sox is the Swiss Army knife of audio manipulation, which is held in the package of the same name. Once installed, we can take a look at its man pages, where it is made clear that it can not only play an audio file, but it can also manipulate it! Here are the lines of code:
SoX reads and writes audio files in most popular formats and can optionally apply effects to them. It can combine multiple input sources, synthesise audio, and, on many systems, act as a general purpose audio player or a multi-track audio recorder. It also has limited ability to split the input into multiple output files. All SoX functionality is available using just the sox command. To simplify playing and recording audio, if SoX is invoked as play, the output file is automatically set to be the default sound device, and if invoked as rec, the default sound device is used as an input source. Additionally, the soxi(1) command provides a convenient way to just query audio file header information. The heart of SoX is a library called libSoX. Those interested in extending SoX or using it in other programs should refer to the libSoX manual page: libsox(3). SoX is a command-line audio processing tool, particularly suited to making quick, simple edits and to batch processing. If you need an interactive, graphical audio editor, use audacity(1).
As we can see in the preceding description, sox and soxi can be used for tons of different usages in manipulating audio files.
we can play a supported audio file format simply using these command lines:
# sox tone-sine-1000hz.wav -t alsa hw:2 tone-sine-1000hz.wav: File Size: 1.76M Bit Rate: 1.41M Encoding: Signed PCM Channels: 2 @ 16-bit Samplerate: 44100Hz Replaygain: off Duration: 00:00:10.00 In:78.9% 00:00:07.89 [00:00:02.11] Out:348k [====|====] Hd:2.4 Clip:0
If involved files have no extensions at all, we can force the audio files using the -t option argument as follows:
# sox tone-sine-1000hz.wav -t au tone-sine -1000hz # file tone-sine-1000hz tone-sine-1000hz: Sun/NeXT audio data: 16-bit linear PCM, stereo, 44100 Hz
If you encounter below error while running the soxi command:
soxi: command not found
You may try installing the below package as per your choice of distribution.
| Distribution | Command |
|---|---|
| OS X | brew install sox |
| Debian | apt-get install sox |
| Ubuntu | apt-get install sox |
| Alpine | apk add sox |
| Arch Linux | pacman -S sox |
| Kali Linux | apt-get install sox |
| CentOS | yum install sox |
| Fedora | dnf install sox |
| Raspbian | apt-get install sox |
sox Command Examples
1. Merge two audio files into one:
$ sox -m input_audiofile1 input_audiofile2 output_audiofile
2. Trim an audio file to the specified times:
$ sox input_audiofile output_audiofile trim start end
3. Normalize an audio file (adjust volume to the maximum peak level, without clipping):
$ sox --norm input_audiofile output_audiofile
4. Reverse and save an audio file:
$ sox input_audiofile output_audiofile reverse
5. Print statistical data of an audio file:
$ sox input_audiofile -n stat
6. Increase the volume of an audio file by 2x:
$ sox -v 2.0 input_audiofile output_audiofile