SoX (Sound eXchange)
More info
- Creator
- Lance Norskog
- Released
- License
- GPL / LGPL
- Website
- sourceforge.net
The Swiss Army knife of audio on the command line: converts, resamples and applies effects, one pipe at a time.
Lance Norskog wrote SoX in 1991, when audio file formats were plentiful and tools were scarce. The basic shape is sox in.wav out.flac rate 48k gain -3: input, output and a chain of effects applied in order. The same binary behaves as play or rec depending on the name it is invoked under, and sox --i reports sample rate, bit depth and duration.
Its resampler has long been counted among the best you can get for free, and lives on as libsoxr, which FFmpeg among others can use. The project itself has barely shipped anything since 14.4.2 in 2015, yet it is still in almost every Linux distribution and in countless scripts nobody dares to touch.