Trisha Shetty (Editor)

SoX

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Developer(s)
  
Chris Bagwell, et al.

Type
  
Audio editing software

Written in
  
C

SoX

Initial release
  
July 1991; 25 years ago (1991-07)

Stable release
  
14.4.2 / 22 February 2015; 2 years ago (2015-02-22)

Operating system
  
Cross-platform: Windows, Linux, OS X

Sound eXchange (SoX) is a cross-platform audio editing software. It has a command-line interface, and is written in standard C. It is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2, with libsox licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License version 2, and distributed by Chris Bagwell through SourceForge.net.

Contents

History

SoX was created in July 1991 by Lance Norskog and posted to the Usenet group alt.sources as Aural eXchange: Sound sample translator. With the second release (in November the same year) it was renamed Sound Exchange. Norskog continued to maintain and release SoX via Usenet, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and then the web until early 1995, at which time SoX was at version 11 (gamma). In May 1996, Chris Bagwell started to maintain and release updated versions of SoX, starting with version sox-11gamma-cb. In September 2000, Bagwell registered the project at SourceForge with project name "sox". The registration was announced on 4 September 2000 and SoX 12.17 was released on 7 September 2000.

Throughout its history SoX has had many contributing authors; Guido van Rossum, best known as creator of the programming language Python, was a significant contributor in SoX's early days.

Features

Some of SoX's features are:

  • Cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Solaris, OS X, et al.)
  • Reading and writing Au, WAV, AIFF, MP3 (via an external LAME MP3 encoder), Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and other audio file formats
  • Recording and playing audio (on many systems); playing via URL (internet file or stream)
  • Editing via concatenate, trim, pad, repeat, reverse, volume, fade, splice, normalise
  • Processing via chorus, flanger, echo, phaser, compressor, delay, filter (high-pass, low-pass, shelving, etc.)
  • Adjustment of speed (pitch and tempo), pitch (without tempo), tempo (without pitch), and sample rate
  • Noise removal using frequency profiling, implemented since December 2004
  • Silent passage removal, implemented since September 2001
  • Simple audio synthesis
  • Multi-file & multi-track mixing
  • Multi-file merging (e.g., 2 mono to 1 stereo)
  • Statistical analysis; spectrogram analysis

    • Examples

    SoX being used to process some audio:

    $ sox track1.wav track1-processed.flac remix - norm -3 highpass 22 gain -3 rate 48k norm -3 dither Input File : 'track1.wav' Channels : 2 Sample Rate : 44100 Precision : 16-bit Duration : 00:02:54.97 = 7716324 samples = 13123 CDDA sectors Sample Encoding: 16-bit Signed Integer PCM Endian Type : little Output File : 'track1-processed.flac' Channels : 1 Sample Rate : 48000 Precision : 16-bit Duration : 00:02:54.97 = 8398720 samples ~ 13123 CDDA sectors Sample Encoding: 16-bit FLAC sox: effects chain: input 44100Hz 2 channels 16 bits (multi) sox: effects chain: remix 44100Hz 2 channels 16 bits (multi) sox: effects chain: norm 44100Hz 1 channels 16 bits sox: effects chain: highpass 44100Hz 1 channels 16 bits sox: effects chain: gain 44100Hz 1 channels 16 bits (multi) sox: effects chain: rate 44100Hz 1 channels 16 bits sox: effects chain: norm 48000Hz 1 channels 16 bits sox: effects chain: dither 48000Hz 1 channels 16 bits (multi) sox: effects chain: output 48000Hz 1 channels 16 bits (multi)

    Playing some audio files:

    $ play *.ogg 01 - Summer's Cauldron.ogg: Encoding: Vorbis Channels: 2 @ 16-bit Track: 01 of 15 Samplerate: 44100Hz Album: Skylarking Album gain: -7.8dB Artist: XTC Duration: 00:03:19.99 Title: Summer's Cauldron In:20.8% 00:00:41.61 [00:02:38.38] Out:1.84M [ ====|==== ] Clip:0

    References

    SoX Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA


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