We developed a standard comprehensive front-end module for a speech recognition system. Several standard front-ends have been implemented, including mel cepstra, perceptual linear prediction, filter bank amplitudes, and delta features. The framework for this system was carefully designed to ensure simple integration with the speech recognition system. The modular design of the software along with an intuitive GUI allow a student of speech processing to easily interchange algorithms and vary every aspect of each model parameter, providing a powerful tutorial. The code itself is written in tutorial fashion, with a direct correlation between algorithmic lines of code and equations in the technical paper. The effectiveness of the different front-end algorithms has been evaluated on a common set of speech data.