Re: [SoX-users] toward floating-point?

[Cory N. <ph...@gm...>]

On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 10:53 AM, robs <aq...@ya...> wrote:
> From: Cory Nelson <ph...@gm...>
> To: sox...@li...
> Sent: Monday, 5 March 2012, 16:20
> Subject: [SoX-users] toward floating-point?
>
> The more I play around with sox, the more annoying it is to constantly
> guess what gain to apply to avoid clipping (-G doesn't work for
> everything).
>
> Do you have an example?  There may be a fix or a work-around.
>

Most recently I encountered this while using compand to prepare music
for playing in a car. (As an aside, compand keeps giving me a warning
that it expected a single channel but got two. Is this okay?)

>
> I know changing at this point would be a large effort but I'm still
> curious, why does sox use integers instead of floating-point?
>
> It's largely historical: in 1991, few could afford an FPU and sox was
> primarily a format (header) conversion tool. These days, almost all the
> effects use floating-point, so building an integer-only version of sox is
> not really on.

I figured it would be something like this. How realistic would it be
to gradually transition the entire pipeline to floating-point, perhaps
with an automatic filter applied to convert to/from integer for
filters which don't yet support it? I haven't looked at sox yet, but
I'd be willing to contribute some patches.

-- 
Cory Nelson
http://int64.org