SoX

SoX is a general-purpose audio processing CLI for file conversion, effect chains, playback, recording, and basic analysis. It fits batch media workflows where you need direct shell control over audio files or streams.

• Convert between many audio formats and audio devices, including piping audio through stdin or stdout inside larger shell workflows.
• Apply edit and mastering operations such as trim, mix, resample, normalize, noise reduction, tempo or pitch changes, and silence-based splitting.
• Inspect audio headers with soxi and generate analysis outputs such as level statistics, frequency stats, and spectrogram PNGs.

• Commands are non-interactive by default and compose well in shell pipelines, which makes SoX useful for repeatable transcode, cleanup, and batch-processing jobs.
• soxi can emit single values for scripts, but SoX does not offer structured JSON output and several analysis commands write human-oriented text to stderr.
• Best when an agent needs to transform or inspect audio files directly; weaker for workflows that need richer media semantics than file-level operations provide.

• Supported formats and device features depend on how SoX was compiled and which optional codec libraries are installed.
• Many operations read or write binary audio data or files, so verification often depends on follow-up metadata checks or listening or media-specific tests rather than text diffs.