SoX (original) (raw)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cross-platform free software digital audio editor

Sound eXchange
Developers	Chris Bagwell, et al.
Initial release	July 1991; 34 years ago (1991-07)
Stable release	14.4.2 / 22 February 2015; 11 years ago (2015-02-22)

Written in	C
Operating system	Cross-platform: Windows, Linux, OS X
Type	Audio editing software
License	GPL-2.0-or-later LGPL-2.1-or-later [1]
Website	sourceforge.net/projects/sox/
Repository	sox.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/sox/sox

Sound eXchange (SoX) is a cross-platform audio editing software. It has a command-line interface, and is written in standard C. It is free software, licensed under GPL-2.0-or-later, with libsox licensed under LGPL-2.1-or-later, and distributed by Chris Bagwell through SourceForge.[1]

SoX was created in July 1991 by Lance Norskog and posted to the Usenet group alt.sources as Aural eXchange: Sound sample translator. With the second release (in November the same year) it was renamed Sound Exchange. Norskog continued to maintain and release SoX via Usenet, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and then the web until early 1995, at which time SoX was at version 11 (gamma). In May 1996, Chris Bagwell started to maintain and release updated versions of SoX, starting with version sox-11gamma-cb. In September 2000, Bagwell registered the project at SourceForge with project name "sox". The registration was announced on 4 September 2000[_citation needed_] and SoX 12.17 was released on 7 September 2000.

Throughout its history SoX has had many contributing authors; Guido van Rossum, best known as creator of the programming language Python, was a significant contributor in SoX's early days.[2]

Code updates at SourceForge have stopped 2015 with version 14.4.2. The sox_ng project bundles bug fixes and new features from several sources, and is used by many distributions to provide the package[3][4].

A SoX spectrogram

Some of SoX's features are:

Cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Solaris, OS X, et al.)
Reading and writing Au, WAV, AIFF, MP3 (via an external LAME MP3 encoder), Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and other audio file formats
Recording and playing audio (on many systems); playing via URL (internet file or stream)
Editing via concatenate, trim, pad, repeat, reverse, volume, fade, splice, normalise
Processing via chorus, flanger, echo, phaser, compressor, delay, filter (high-pass, low-pass, shelving, etc.)
Adjustment of speed (pitch and tempo), pitch (without tempo), tempo (without pitch), and sample rate
Noise removal using frequency profiling, implemented since December 2004
Silent passage removal, implemented since September 2001
Simple audio synthesis
Generating White noise, Pink noise, and Brown noise
Multi-file & multi-track mixing
Multi-file merging (e.g., 2 mono to 1 stereo)
Statistical analysis; spectrogram analysis

SoX being used to process some audio:

$ sox track1.wav track1-processed.flac remix - norm -3 highpass 22 gain -3 rate 48k norm -3 dither

Input File : 'track1.wav' Channels : 2 Sample Rate : 44100 Precision : 16-bit Duration : 00:02:54.97 = 7716324 samples = 13123 CDDA sectors Sample Encoding: 16-bit Signed Integer PCM Endian Type : little

Output File : 'track1-processed.flac' Channels : 1 Sample Rate : 48000 Precision : 16-bit Duration : 00:02:54.97 = 8398720 samples ~ 13123 CDDA sectors Sample Encoding: 16-bit FLAC

sox: effects chain: input 44100Hz 2 channels 16 bits (multi) sox: effects chain: remix 44100Hz 2 channels 16 bits (multi) sox: effects chain: norm 44100Hz 1 channels 16 bits sox: effects chain: highpass 44100Hz 1 channels 16 bits sox: effects chain: gain 44100Hz 1 channels 16 bits (multi) sox: effects chain: rate 44100Hz 1 channels 16 bits sox: effects chain: norm 48000Hz 1 channels 16 bits sox: effects chain: dither 48000Hz 1 channels 16 bits (multi) sox: effects chain: output 48000Hz 1 channels 16 bits (multi)

Playing some audio files:

$ play *.ogg

01 - Summer's Cauldron.ogg:

Encoding: Vorbis Channels: 2 @ 16-bit Track: 01 of 15 Samplerate: 44100Hz Album: Skylarking Album gain: -7.8dB Artist: XTC Duration: 00:03:19.99 Title: Summer's Cauldron

In:20.8% 00:00:41.61 [00:02:38.38] Out:1.84M [ ====|==== ] Clip:0

Generating Brown noise:

$ play -n synth brown play WARN alsa: can't encode 0-bit Unknown or not applicable

File Size: 0
Encoding: n/a
Channels: 1 @ 32-bit
Samplerate: 48000Hz
Replaygain: off
Duration: unknown

In:0.00% 00:00:17.41 [00:00:00.00] Out:836k [!=====|=====!] Hd:0.0 Clip:0

SoX has had several vulnerabilities listed in the National Vulnerability Database since its last public release in 2015. These vulnerabilities include stack and heap overflows and denial-of-service attacks.

^ a b "SoX licensing". Archived from the original on 2021-06-02. Retrieved 2021-06-02.
^ van Rossum, Guido. "Guido van Rossum - Personal Home Page". Guido's Personal Home Page. Archived from the original on 28 January 2018. Retrieved 5 November 2021. And here is a link to SOX, to which I contributed some early code.
^ "Debian package". Debian package search. Retrieved 2026-02-01.{{[cite web](/wiki/Template:Cite%5Fweb "Template:Cite web")}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
^ "Gentoo package". Gentoo package. Retrieved 2026-02-01.{{[cite web](/wiki/Template:Cite%5Fweb "Template:Cite web")}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)