How to Manipulate Sound Files with SoX

The wonderful world of editing sound files on the command line

Michael J. Jordan

Linux Online Inc.
Michael.Jordan-AT-linux-DOT-org

Table of Contents

• Using SoX
• Knock my SoX off
• Amaze and annoy your friends
• Trim off the junk
• Using SoX with Ogg Vorbis
• Conclusion

Using SoX

It's the command line, but do not be afraid. Some years ago, before my Linux days, I had a Win95 box with a Sound Blaster card. It came with a nice program (whose name escapes me) for manipulating sound files. When I passed to the Linux world back in late 1997, there was nothing like this available, so I used to dual-boot back into the Windows machine to use it. Later, it may have been around 1999, I found a similar program for Linux which was somewhat buggy but worked pretty well. Again, the name of this program escapes me (I believe it started with an M and had an X it it somewhere). At some point, I upgraded to a newer version of suse of SuSE I was using at the time, and this program, which I had begun to rely on, just wouldn't compile for my new setup. Other stuff I looked at proved too buggy to be usable or had the same problems that it wouldn't compile or the dependencies were too tough to work out. Again, being a refugee from the Linux world, I had the same problem that Spock saw in Khan in the movie Wrath of Khan - namely, I wasn't thinking three dimensionally - or in my case, I wasn't thinking like a Unix user. If you're using a Unix-like system, you can always rely on the command line to get you out of any jam. That's when I became acquainted with SoX.

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