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SoX: Sound eXchange
SoX (also known as Sound eXchange) translates sound samples between different
file formats, and optionally applies various sound effects.
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.
This release understands:
o Raw files in various binary formats
o Raw textual data
o Amiga 8svx files
o Apple/SGI AIFF files
o SUN .au style files
o PCM, u-law, a-law
o G7xx ADPCM files (read only)
o mutant DEC .au files
o NeXT .snd files
o AVR files
o CD-R (music CD format)
o CVS and VMS files (continous variable slope)
o GSM files.
o Macintosh HCOM files
o Amiga MAUD files
o IRCAM SoundFile files
o NIST SPHERE files
o Turtle beach SampleVision files.
o Soundtool (DOS) files
o Yamaha TX-16W sampler files.
o Sound Blaster .VOC files
o Microsoft .WAV files
o PCM, u-law, a-law
o MS ADPCM, IMA ADPCM
o GSM
o Psion (palmtop) A-law WVE files
o Pseudo-file fomats that allow direct playing/recording
from some audio devices under unix.
o Pseudo-nul file that reads and writes from/to nowhere
The sound effects include:
o Channel Averaging
o Band-pass filters
o Band-reject filter
o Chorus effect
o DCShift audio. Useful to get the best volume adjustments.
o Move sound stage of CD audio to in front of you (for headphone use)
o Add an echo
o Add a sequence of echos
o Fade in and out
o Apply a flanger effect
o Apply a high-pass filter
o Apply a low-pass filter
o Pan sound between channels
o Change the pitch of a sound file
o Display a list of loops in a file
o Add masking noise to a signal
o Apply a phaser effect
o Convert from stereo to mono
o Change sampling rates using several different algorithms.A
'resample' and 'poyphase' effect use high-grade signal rate
changes using real signal theory!
o Apply a reverb effect
o Reverse the sound samples (to search for Satanic messages ;-)
o Trim off silence from the beginning of end of a file.
o Change the speed of samples being played (like speeding up the motor
on a tape recorder)
o Convert from mono to stereo
o Display general stats on a sound sample
o Stretch/shorten the duration of a sound file.
o Swap stereo channels
o Create sounds with a simple synthesizer.
o Trim audio data from beginning and end of file.
o Add the world-famous Fender Vibro-Champ effect
o Adjust volume of samples
History:
This is release 12.17, Patchlevel 2 of the Sound Tools.
SoX was originally written and maintained by Lance Norskog but
unfortunetly he has stopped maintaining it since 1995. I, Chris
Bagwell (cbagwell@users.sourceforge.net), have started maintaining it since
1996 to the present.
Caveats:
Technically, SoX is made up of a sound file processing library called libst
and SoX is a program implemented using this library.
Installing:
Unless your using a precompiled binary version, you will need to compile
SoX as described in the INSTALL file. Please read that file for further
instructions.
Now, read sox.txt and soxexam.txt. This gives a background on how
SoX deals with sound files and how to convert this format
to that format, and apply various effects.
SoX has an auto-detect feature that attempts to figure out
the nature of an unmarked sound sample. It works very well.
This feature is used if you specify '-t auto' for the file type.
I hope to inspire the creation of a common base of sound processing
tools for computer multimedia work, similar to the PBM toolkit for
image manipulation.
If you have bug fixes/enhancements, please send it to me as I would like
to coordinate the releases. Please document your changes. I don't
possess every kind of computer currently sold, and SoX is now beyond
the phase where I can understand and test most of your contributions.
The majority of SoX features and source code are contributed
by you the user. Thank you very much for making SoX a success!