Re: [SoX-users] Does anyone actually use 'v' and 'V' when playing a file?

[Doug L. <dg...@dl...>]

I never saw those keys work with hardware. I may have used them if they did, but not extremely often.

v and V work on a softvol effect on my old Mac; but they are effectively negated if the doubletime is not 0. This seems mathematically sensible but intuitively unexpected.

I also find some anomalies with headroom: Depending on multiplier, high headroom values result in sudden sound cutoff as the volume starts ramping up. I see no recovery from this state. (I tried values above 1.0, like 2, 5, etc., to try to cap the volume ramp far enough below max volume that other sounds in my headset could still be heard.)

I mention that unrelated anomaly because I wonder if v and V should affect headroom, or alternatively, if v and V should be able to apply to vol instead of softvol so that the dynamics of softvol won't alter the result.

On Wed, Jan 21, 2026 at 05:42:55PM +0100, Martin Guy wrote:
Hi
  The manual has long said that pressing the v and V keys
in interactive mode (i.e. "play" or "-d") will decrease and
increase the volume of the audio mixer, but this was only ever
implemented for Solaris (-t sunau) and OSS on Linux, not for
alsa, ao (Xiph's libao device driver), coreaudio (Mac),
pulseaudio, sndio or waveaudio (Windows)

  However, the OSS compatibility layer for ALSA is not generally
enabled by default, or is not included in many Linux distributions,
which is presumably why 'v' and 'V' don't work any more.

  So my question is whether anyone actually uses and likes 'v' and 'V'
or whether I can just remove this functionality, which would be easier
than writing the code to drive half a dozen audio mixer controllers.

   As of sox-14.9 in May you'll be able to achieve the same effect
by including a final "softvol" effect and using

    --keymap v:softvol.volume-2 --keymap V:softvol.volume+2

or that could be the default mapping for v and V.

Thanks

    M


-- 
Doug Lee                 dg...@dl...                http://www.dlee.org
"Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you
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