Does anyone else use SoX for sample processing?

[JeffLearman]

SoX is a command-line program that does virtually anything you can imagine to audio files, in terms of specifiable algorithms, including sample rate conversion, filtering, mixing/multiplexing, dynamic range compression/expansion, pitch shift, noise sampling & reduction, stretching, tempo change, etc. It handles a very wide variety of audio formats (wave, aiff, flac, etc.) I find it handy for handling large sets of sample files since I can write a bash or dos script to apply it to lots of files, and it's fast.

The audio quality is excellent, which you can see if you compare it with others, here:

http://src.infinitewave.ca/

It's difficult to use at first due to the way the command works and how the manual is written, but given examples and a little playing with it and it quickly becomes clearer. Here's a Linux man page: https://linux.die.net/man/1/sox . It's supported on Windows, Linux, and Mac and maybe others.

One limitation is that it ignores and deletes "smpl" chunks, which can be used to store looping information in wave and flac files. I'd like to get that fixed. If anyone else would find that helpful, please join sourceforge.net and comment on this ticket:

https://sourceforge.net/p/sox/feature-requests/72/

Thanks! Meanwhile, for those of us who process big sample sets, sox rocks, and maybe it deserves some more attention here.

[DSmolken]

For conversion and mixing, yeah. Being command line, it's kinda awkward if you use it once every six months, but very efficient to work with if you use it weekly and remember the switches. A lot of the algos produce very high quality results.

[JeffLearman]

Thanks. I always use it in a script so I can see what I did later.