Monday, September 21, 2015

[Sound] Using SOX to convert WAV to MP3

I was sent a rather large WAV file today: a delightful composition by Ivodne Galatea called 'Ingenious Pursuits'. She's also sent me the score so I can learn to play it myself.

At 91MB I thought I might have a go at converting the WAV to MP3. Enter
Sound eXchange which very comfortably converted the WAV using the following extremely simple command:
sox "Ingeniuous Pursuits automated.wav" Ingeniuous.mp3
SoX can do way more than this with sound files. The above barely scratches the surface of the amazing power of this tool.

Having said that, the Windows installer did not include a copy of the LAME (Lame Aint an MP3 Encoder) DLL (libmp3lame.dll). I had to go hunting for that and even when I found it I had to rename it, as every ZIP I downloaded called the dll lame_enc.dll (I found downloads at
spaghetticode.org and buanzo.org). After that everything worked fine.

SoX is great. Highly recommended. I don't know the author and no one paid me to write this.


© Copyright Bruce M. Axtens, 2015

1 comment:

Unknown said...

What Bruce is too modest to say is I wrote it for him, trying to fit in with the style he likes to play. I owe Bruce an unpayable debt for visiting my house with a ukulele a few years ago, letting me play it, and changing my life so much for the better. 23 ukuleles and 57 compositions later, this is my thanks to him