[LAU] sox: everything on the internet is wrong

[Ken Restivo]

I was going to use sox for something, but I'm getting really angry.

Sox's syntax is a notorious clusterfudge, so for the last 10 years ago I've been working off of recipies that I'd either figured out for myself or pulled off the internets. And I'd gotten accustomed to just Googling for whatever it is I wanted to so, and finding that someone had already navigated the nightmare of syntax to figure out how to do it in sox.

No more.

Something big and evil has changed in sox, and none of the recipes on the interents seem to work anymore.

Example: I want to split a stereo JACK-compatible 32-bit float broadcast WAV file into two mono 32-bit float mono WAV files. Ohh kaaay...

Somewhere on the internets, it says to do this:
sox infile.wav outfile.l.wav remix 1


Um, no!

sox soxio: Can't open input file `remix': No such file or directory

Huh? "remix" isn't a file, you doofus, it's a command.

OK, I look some more, and I find a totally different syntax to do the same operation:

sox infile.wav -c 1 outfile.l.wav avg -l

Wrong again!

sox sox: Effect `avg' is deprecated; see sox(1) for an alternative

Great, so I go see sox(1), and I search for "avg", and it's nowhere mentioned in the manual.

If sox were a physical object, I would fling it out the window or smash it with my fist. Alas, it isn't, so the best I can do is rant here. And go looking for a different command line tool to replace sox with.


-ken