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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

SoX is amazing. http://sox.sourceforge.net/

It’s not perfect but it’s way easier to use for audio stuff than FFmpeg is. I have a bunch of scripts I reuse that do basic stuff like high-pass, normalize, automatically trim audio files, add fade-in or fade-out, downmix to mono, and then resample / dither to the right depth and size.

It also will spit out spectrograms.

Generally when I need to record a ton of sound clips, I chop the audio up and rename it in a GUI editor similar to Audacity, and then do all the processing in SoX. I might also do a bunch of work in a DAW beforehand.

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> SoX is amazing.

100% agree.

The man pages are chock full of examples too, which is great because the tool does a lot. Some of the examples are really interesting too, such as the delay effect showing how to synthesise a guitar chord.

I use an audio player built largely around sox¹, and it allows you to take advantage of the power of sox.

1. https://80x24.org/dtas.git/about/

SoX is amazing because it indeed makes very nice spectrograms which visually show how audio is encoded. It makes it easy to see if this really is a lossless FLAC or a crappy 192 VBC mp3 audio source.

If you personally hear the difference is a completely different subject of course.

I hadn't even thought about SOX 'till your comment in about 10 years. And looking at the page, there hasn't been a new release since 2015.

From what I recall, it only worked on wav files back in the day, but now it supports OGG. But a lot has changed in even 5 years - does it even support MP3, as patents expired since then?

> From what I recall, it only worked on wav files back in the day

It depends on your build, but on my system it supports: 8svx aif aifc aiff aiffc al amb amr-nb amr-wb anb au avr awb caf cdda cdr cvs cvsd cvu dat dvms f32 f4 f64 f8 fap flac fssd gsm gsrt hcom htk ima ircam la lpc lpc10 lu mat mat4 mat5 maud mp2 mp3 nist ogg paf prc pvf raw s1 s16 s2 s24 s3 s32 s4 s8 sb sd2 sds sf sl sln smp snd sndfile sndr sndt sou sox sph sw txw u1 u16 u2 u24 u3 u32 u4 u8 ub ul uw vms voc vorbis vox w64 wav wavpcm wv wve xa xi. You can check your own with `sox --help`.

On Debian mp3 support requires `libsox-fmt-mp3`.

I just use SoX for processing audio data, and then pass the result to LAME if I want an MP3. Each format has so many different options for encoding and metadata anyway. It’s not like video, where the sheer amount of data discourages you from working uncompressed.

Sure, there hasn’t been a new release since 2015… but would that be necessary? It’s not missing any features I want.

It's not important that it doesn't support mp3. That's not it's purpose - it doesn't need to. The unix philosophy. Feel free to pipeline it on either side with tools that do support MP3.

according to https://github.com/chirlu/sox/commit/af261dcc91071cafd7d8305..., sox added support for Ogg Vorbis files in 2001, which is a little more than 5 years ago. since sox didn't exist until 1999 and vorbis didn't exist until 2000, that seems like pretty solid format support to me.

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