Author: Lance Norskog thinman@netcom.com Chris Bagwell cbagwell@tddtx.fujitsu.com Platforms: NeXT, Intel, HP Prerequisites: (see description) Price: free Demo: To acquire: http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/cbagwell/sox-12.15.tar.gz (196k) ftp://ftp.eecs.umich.edu/pub/nextmusic/Sox10.tar.Z usenet://comp.sources.misc Information: http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/cbagwell/projects.html http://www.spies.com/Sox/ Entry updated: 7 February 1999 Description: Command-line utility to translate between sound file formats and perform sound effects SOX 10 Sound Tools translates sound samples between different file formats, and performs various sound effects. This release understands "raw" files in various binary formats, raw textual data, Sound Blaster .VOC files, IRCAM SoundFile files, SUN Sparcstation .au files, mutant DEC .au files, Apple/SGI AIFF files, CD-R (music CD format), Macintosh HCOM files, Sounder files, NeXT .snd files, SUN ADPCM (compressed) .au files, and Soundtool (DOS) files. The sound effects include changing the sample rate, adding echo delay lines, applying low-, high, and band-pass filtering, reversing a sample in order to search for Satanic messages,and the infamous Fender Vibro effect. There is a nice graphical front-end for the NeXT called GISO. Caveats: SOX is intended as the Swiss Army knife of sound processing tools. It doesn't do anything very well, but sooner or later it comes in very handy. SOX is really only useable day-to-day if you hide the wacky options with one-line shell scripts. Channel averaging doesn't work. The software architecture of stereo & quad is bogus. Installation: The sox program is just a batch utility that reads & writes files. It's very easy to port to new computers. [Note: ftp://ftp.eecs.umich.edu/pub/nextmusic/Sox10.tar.Z has already been ported to NeXTStep.] This distribution will compile and run on most Unix systems. It was developed on a Unix/386 machine running AT&T V.3.2. It has been ported to many AT&T V.3- and V.4-flavored Unixes, and many BSD-derived Unixes as well. It also runs under DOS with Borland C (version 1.5, probably later too). For Borland C, use 'Makefile.bor'. For the Amiga, use 'Makefile.ami'. For Unix, use 'Makefile.unx'. For V.3 and V.4 Unix, the Makefile should work as is. For SUN, NeXT, and other Unixes derived from Berkeley Unix, you'll need to comment out these four lines in the Makefile: CFLAGS = $O -DSYSV CC = cc AR = ar r RANLIB = ar ts and uncomment the following ones: # CFLAGS = $O # CC = cc # AR = ar r # RANLIB = ranlib
I did some surfing and found the Sox Webpage and grabbed the latest version to try out and decided to fix some bugs and add support for the above stuff. I gave the patches to the author of Sox (Lance Norskog, thinman@meer.net) and he said he'd add them to his next release but he's a busy guy and hasn't made one since 1995. And so I began my own releases of Sox to make all my changes available.
Since my first release in early 1996, many people have been kind enough to send me their own bugfixes and features for sox which I have started incorporating. I have also begun actively supporting Sox by looking into bug reports and feature requests as they are sent to me.
Sox is a general purpose sound converter/player/recorder that supports
the following formats:
|
|
The following effects can be applied to sound data:
|
|
Things fixed/added since last release (12.14):
|
|
Sox is often used to convert an audio file from one sampling rate to another rate (i.e. from DAT to CD rates). Sox's currently has three different algorythms that each suffer from different problems. Please read a good technical overview of each's ability and possibly provide improvements if your into DSP.
This version of Sox has been tested under Linux, SunOS, and Solaris and I have received success reports for various other platforms such as DOS and Irix. I have had problems trying to compile and run it using Turbo C under DOS (16-bit mode) but it seems to work fine when compiled with DJGCC (32-bit mode).
No screen shots of sox since there is not much to see it do. Just think of any command line util that has an insane amount of options and a lousy interface. :-) But, hey, it does its job very well despite that.
Download the latest version (last updated September 30, 1998): http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/cbagwell/sox-12.15.tar.gz
Other files available (soon to all be updated to 12.15)
NOTE: Those interested in editing Sox's source code will
also be interested in the Audio File Format FAQ
which I also maintain. There is also a low volume (or should I say zero
volume :-) mailing list set up that you can subscribe to by sending
a blank email to sox-subscribe@makelist.com
or read the archive at http://www.findmail.com/list/sox.