Re: [SoX-users] Ogg Vorbis support in Sox

[Chris B. <Chr...@fn...>]

vo...@as... wrote:
> 
> I've been working on adding support for the Ogg Vorbis format (see
> http://www.vorbis.com/ for more info) to the CVS version of sox. 

Great to hear!  I've been hoping someone would have time to do this!

> So far, I
> can use a vorbis file as input without any problems.  I'm currently trying to
> decide how best to implement the output half of the vorbis driver, though.
> 
> I need to be able to pass to the vorbis driver--in addition to the normal
> channels, bits, sample rate stuff--a value representing the desired target bit
> rate for the output.

Yes, the same problem has perplexed me when thinking about adding MP3
support as well.

I come to the following conclusion, although I'd change my mind if
someone could come to an eligent solution to the general problem of
often needing to pass extra information to format handlers then sox's
current command line parsing can handle.

I've decided that compression formats like Ogg Vorbis and MP3 just
require to many options to be supported properly by a swiss-army knife
approach that sox takes.  They will always need their own stand alone
program to handle all the options (or at least a GUI that allows for a
much better user interaction then a command line does).  

I still think support inside sox would be nice though.  Reading all
types of Ogg Vorbis files by sox seems OK since you can derive most all
the data from the file itself.  For writing files I would suggest
picking the most popular encoding parameters and default to that in all
cases.

Chris