SoX

SoX: Sound eXchange
-------------------

SoX (also known as Sound eXchange) translates sound files 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 (continuous 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 Ogg Vorbis 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 formats 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, duplication, and removal
  o Band-pass filters
  o Band-reject filter
  o Chorus effect
  o DCShift audio.  Useful to get the best volume adjustments.
  o Deemphases filter
  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 Display a list of loops in a file
  o Add masking noise to a signal
  o Pan sound between channels
  o Apply a phaser effect
  o Change the pitch of a sound file without effecting its speed
  o Change sampling rates using several different algorithms. A
     'resample' and 'polyphase' 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 Detect periods of silence and start and stop processing based on it
  o Change the speed of samples being played (like speeding up the motor
    on a tape recorder)
  o Display general stats on a sound sample
  o Stretch/shorten the duration of a sound file (without effecting pitch).
  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 12.17.3 of SoX and its companion library Sound Tools.
SoX was originally written and maintained by Lance Norskog but is
currently maintained by Chris Bagwell (cbagwell()users.sourceforge.net).

Installing:

Unless your using a pre-compiled binary version, you will need to compile
SoX as described in the INSTALL file.  Please read that file for further
instructions.

SoX is distributed with two text files named sox.txt and soxexam.txt.
These files give a background on how SoX deals with sound files and
what command line options are available to convert a sound file to
another file format and how to apply sound effects.

SoX has an auto-detect feature that attempts to figure out
the nature of a sound file.  It does this by looking for 'magic values'
in the header of the audio file.  If it is unable to detect the format
of the sound file then the user must use command line options to
inform SoX.

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 do not 
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!