#247 SoX randomly fails to read stdin

[Ariel Shkedi]

SoX will randomly fail to read stdin. Here's the command line:

flac --decode --stdout "$f" | sox - -t wav - contrast 0 | lame ....

If I keep trying it, sometimes it works, sometimes not.

When it doesn't work it says: "sox FAIL formats: can't open input `-': WAVE: RIFF header not found". When it works it works perfectly, no problem in the result.

(To make sure it was not flac with the problem I used tee in between to capture a failure and it was identical to success.)

If I add a buffer command in between flac and sox it works every time.

[robs]

I believe that this bug was in 14.4.0, and fixed in 14.4.1—please can you try a later version?

[Ariel Shkedi]

I'm using version v14.4.1 and it happens there. Is there a newer version I should try?

[robs]

No, v14.4.1 is the latest. Here, I get the error every time with 14.4.0 but not at all with 14.4.1. Please can you post the output of "sox -V -V --ver" as it contains a few other useful pieces of information.

[Ariel Shkedi]

sox -V -V --ver
sox: SoX v14.4.1
time: Apr 16 2013 03:39:20
issue: Debian
uname: Linux localhost 3.2.60 #2 SMP Wed Jul 23 19:26:55 EDT 2014 x86_64
compiler: gcc 4.7.2
arch: 1248 48 44 L OMP

It doesn't happen every time - maybe 10-30% of the time.

[Mark Borgerding]

Edit: This was a bug in vorbis-tools (oggdec). See my "On closer examination" post below. Original post for posterity follows:

I observe consistent (100%) failure on Centos7 and the two most recent Ubuntu versions (14.04 LTS and 14.10) when trying to pipe data into sox. both report sox --version v14.4.1

This version of the command consistently fails

oggdec -o - /tmp/Example.ogg | sox -t wav -  -t au - > output.au

FAIL formats: can't open input  `-': WAVE: RIFF header not found

but the following succeeds:

oggdec -o - /tmp/Example.ogg > DATA
cat DATA | sox -t wav -  -t au - > output.au

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Example.ogg

[Mark Borgerding]

Here's the extra version info as was earlier suggested.

It fails consistently under all these platforms

Under CentOS Linux release 7.0.1406 :

$ sox -V -V --ver
sox:      SoX v14.4.1
time:     Jun 10 2014 00:25:39
issue:    Fedora
uname:    Linux schur 3.10.0-123.20.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Thu Jan 29 18:05:33 UTC 2015  x86_64
compiler: gcc 4.8.2 20140120 (Red Hat 4.8.2-16)
arch:     1288 48 88 L OMP

Under Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS :

$ sox -V -V --ver
sox:      SoX v14.4.1
time:     Dec 31 2013 01:47:13
issue:    Ubuntu
uname:    Linux descartes 3.13.0-45-generic #74-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jan 13 19:36:28 UTC 2015 x86_64
compiler: gcc 4.8.2
arch:     1288 48 88 L OMP

Under Ubuntu 14.10:

$ sox -V -V --ver
sox:      SoX v14.4.1
time:     May 23 2014 02:18:33
issue:    Ubuntu
uname:    Linux galois 3.16.0-31-generic #41-Ubuntu SMP Tue Feb 10 15:24:04 UTC 2015 x86_64
compiler: gcc 4.8.3
arch:     1288 48 88 L OMP

[Mark Borgerding]

OK, on closer examination, it looks like this is a problem with vorbis-tools. Under some conditions, oggdec writes its version number to stdout.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=595104

[markb@schur]$ oggdec -o - /tmp/Example.ogg > /tmp/f1
[markb@schur]$ head -c4 /tmp/f1
RIFF

[markb@schur]$ oggdec -o - /tmp/Example.ogg |cat > /tmp/f2
[markb@schur]$ head -c4 /tmp/f2
oggd

i.e. the redirection (">") is acting differently than the stdio pipe ("|")

[Mans Rullgard]

I'm closing this.