SoX

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"sound exchange" redirects here. For the music industry organization, see SoundExchange.

Sound eXchange
Developed by	Chris Bagwell
OS	Cross platform
Genre	Digital audio editor
License	GNU General Public License
Website	http://sox.sourceforge.net/

Sound eXchange, abbreviated SoX, is a free digital audio editor which is licensed under the GNU General Public License and distributed by Chris Bagwell through SourceForge.net. SoX is written in standard C, with a command line interface.

The latest stable release of SoX is 14.0.1, released on January 29, 2008.

[edit] Features

Some of SoX's features are:

Multi-platform (Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X)
Reading and writing AU, WAV, AIFF, MP3 (via an external LAME MP3 encoder), Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and other file formats
Recording and playing audio (on Unix-like systems)
Editing via concatenate, trim, pad, repeat, reverse, volume, fade
Processing via chorus, flanger, echo, phaser, compressor, filter (high-pass, low-pass, shelving, etc.)
Speed (pitch and tempo), pitch (without tempo), and tempo (without pitch) adjustment
Noise removal
Simple audio synthesis
Multi-file & multi-track mixing
Multi-file merging (e.g. 2 mono to 1 stereo)

On Unix-like systems, SoX (as the play command) is commonly provided as the system audio file player; the following screen-shot shows an example of SoX being used in this way:

$ play *.ogg

Input File     : '01 - Summer's Cauldron.ogg'
Sample Size    : 16-bit (2 bytes)
Sample Encoding: Vorbis
Channels       : 2
Sample Rate    : 44100
Replay gain    : -7.78 dB
Comments       :
TITLE=Summer's Cauldron
ARTIST=XTC
ALBUM=Skylarking
DATE=1986
TRACKNUMBER=01
TRACKTOTAL=15
GENRE=Rock

Time: 01:42.54 [01:37.45] of 03:19.99 (51.3%) Samples out: 121k  Clips: 0

[edit] History

SoX was first released in 1992 by Lance Norskog. In 1995, Norskog released his final version of SoX; he has not maintained any version of SoX since that time. In 1996, Chris Bagwell released a modified version of SoX. On 2000-09-01, Bagwell registered his free "sox" project with Sourceforge. The announcement of the registration was made on the 4th of that month, and SoX 12.17 was released on September 7.