Groovy Bytes: Behind the Moon/groovybytes.iso/GROOVY/SND_TOOL/WM10.ZIP/DOC.DAT/soxwrtup.txt

Text File | 1995-08-30 | 5.6 KB | 122 lines

 SOX translates sound samples between different file formats, and performs
 various sound effects.

 This release understands "raw" files in various binary formats, raw textual
 data, Sound Blaster VOC files, IRCAM SoundFile files, SUN Sparcstation AU
 files, mutant DEC AU files, Apple/SGI AIFF files, CD-R (music CD format),
 Macintosh HCOM files, Sounder files, NeXT SND files, SUN ADPCM (compressed)
 AU files, and Soundtool (DOS) files.

 The sound effects include changing the sample rate, adding echo delay lines,
 applying low-, high, and band-pass filtering, reversing a sample in order to
 search for Satanic messages, and the infamous Fender Vibro effect.

 History:

 This is the tenth release of SOX. Patchlevel 11. All previous releases went
 out on alt.sources. This one should go out on comp.sources.misc, if all goes
 well.

 There is a nice graphical front-end for the NeXT called GISO. Check the
 comp.sys.next group or poke around the NeXT binary sites. Also someone has
 done an OS/2 port.

 SOX can now decompress SUN ADPCM compressed sound files. Internet Talk Radio
 is now distributed in this format, I believe. If not, it soon will be.

 Caveats:

 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. SOX is
 really only useable day-to-day if you hide the wacky options with one-line
 shell scripts.

 Channel averaging doesn't work. The software architecture of stereo & quad is
 bogus.

 SOX uses file suffices to determine the nature of a sound sample file.
 If it finds the suffix in its list, it uses the appropriate read or write
 handler to deal with that file. You may override the suffix by giving a
 different type via the "-t type" argument. See the manual page for more
 information {SOXman}.

 SOX has an auto-detect feature that attempts to figure out the nature of an
 unmarked sound sample. It works very well. This is the 'auto' file format.

 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.

 Sound Tools may be used for any purpose. Source distributions must include the
 copyright notices. Binary distributions must include acknowledgements to the
 creators. The files I wrote are copyright Lance Norskog. The contributed files
 are copyright by their respective authors.

 When you have minor changes to contribute, it's OK to post them; if you have a
 major release, please send it to me. I'd like to coordinate the releases and
 do a peer review. Please document your changes. I don't possess every kind
 of computer currently sold, and SOX is now beyond the phase where I can
 understand and test most of your contributions. Please make your diff files
 such that your changes are set off with ifdefs, and document them.

 Please DO NOT reformat the source code with your favorite C beautifier, make
 10 fixes, and send me the resulting release. I do not have the time to fish
 through 10000 diffs to find your 10 fixes.

 Note: There will be absolutely no more hardware driver handlers in SOX.
 Playing & recording sound samples is not SOX's job; translation and sound
 effects is it. If you wish to write a separate main program (like SOX.C)
 which uses the SoundTools library and records or plays on your machine,
 that's great and I'll be happy to include it.

 The majority of SOX features and source code are contributed by you the user.
 Thank you very much for making SOX a success!

     Creator & Maintainer:

         Lance Norskog           [e-mail]

     Contributors:

         Guido Van Rossum        [e-mail]
             AU, AIFF, AUTO, HCOM, reverse,
             many bug fixes
         Jef Poskanzer           [e-mail]
             original code for u-law and delay line
         Bill Neisius            [e-mail]
             DOS port, 8SVX, Sounder, Soundtool formats
             Apollo fixes, stat with auto-picker
         Rick Richardson         [e-mail]
             WAV and SB driver handlers, fixes
         David Champion          [e-mail]
             Amiga port
         Pace Willisson          [e-mail]
             Fixes for ESIX
         Leigh Smith             [e-mail]
             SMP and comment movement support.
         David Sanderson         [e-mail]
             AIX3.1 fixes
         Glenn Lewis             [e-mail]
             AIFF chunking fixes
         Brian Campbell          [e-mail]
             QNX port and 16-bit fixes
         Chris Adams             [e-mail]
             DOS port fixes
         John Kohl               [e-mail]
             BSD386 port, VOC stereo support
         Ken Kubo                [e-mail]
             VMS port, VOC stereo support
         Frank Gadegast          <[e-mail]>
             Microsoft C 7.0 & C Borland 3.0 ports
         David Elliot            <[e-mail]>
             CD-R format support
         David Sears             <[e-mail]>
             Linux support
         Tom Littlejohn          <[e-mail]>
             Raw textual data
         Boisy G. Pitre          [e-mail]
             OS9 port
         Sun Microsystems, Guido Van Rossum
             CCITT G.711, G.721, G.723 implementation

         (your name could be here, too)