"Peter P." <peterparker@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Dear Sox list, > > I am stumbling over a (known) problem: > > I am trying to concatenate many audio files with > > sox "*.wav" out.wav > > and after some time am getting the error message > > sox FAIL formats: can’t open input file ‘whatever.wav’ : Too many open files > > I have found other people's postings about the same issue, as eg > http://sox.10957.n7.nabble.com/Sox-Too-many-open-files-concatenating-from-playlists-with-a-large-number-of-entries-td5117.html > > The max number of files to be concatenated this way seems to vary in > between operating systems. Or does anyone know exact numbers, or how to > determine the maximum number on a given OS? "ulimit -n" shows open files on *nix based systems. You can change it (given appropriate permissions) by setting it to a higher number (e.g. "ulimit -n 16384") > Now I understand that sox is keeping them all opened when concatenating > them, which might be necessary in other cases, as when trying to > normalize them all to a common level. Sadly this seems to impose the > described limit. Or is there another reason why all files have to be > kept open? I haven't checked, but I can't think of a reason off hand why they must be kept open. I suppose there could be some reasons for wanting to seek around... I'm too sleepy and barely awake to think straight now :< Will check the code when I've more time. > I tried to work around this by recursively concatenating each input file > to a common (growing) output file using a simple bash until loop. The > performance penalty of this is enormous, as the same output file has to > be opened, read and written each time again. > > I am curious what a possible workaround could be, other than dividing > above task between multiple calls of sox, each with a reduced number of > files. Similar to what Erich said, maybe something like this works by utilizing pipelines to avoid temporary files: FMT="-ts32 -c2 -b24 -r48000" # adjust format to match your data sox $FMT "|for i in *.wav; do sox \$i $FMT -; done" out.wav ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Developer Access Program for Intel Xeon Phi Processors Access to Intel Xeon Phi processor-based developer platforms. With one year of Intel Parallel Studio XE. Training and support from Colfax. Order your platform today. http://sdm.link/xeonphi _______________________________________________ Sox-users mailing list Sox-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sox-users
