Dear all, in my opinion SoX is a very powerful package for command-line audio processing. Hence to be able to exactly mimic its behaviour in a digital audio workstation (DAW) I have reimplemented its algorithms as open-source audio plugins for DAWs. The package "SoX-Plugins" provides VST plugins for the - in my opinion - more prominent audio processing effects from SoX like filters, gain, overdrive, compander and reverb. It is completely free, open-source, platform-neutral, programmed in C++ and based on the JUCE audio framework. Currently only a version for VST3 plugins under Windows 10 is provided, but porting it to other targets should be straightforward, since building is supported by a platform-neutral CMAKE build file. During the reimplementation in C++ I have restructured and simplified the original C code of SoX for easier maintenance, because there were some redundancies and unnecessary complexity due to their several contributors. Nevertheless the implementation aims at producing bit-exact identical renderings in the DAW, i.e. one can be sure that the DAW will produce exactly the same results as the external rendering by SoX. A test subtracting DAW audio and external rendering reveals that this goal is achieved: apart from roundoff errors (SoX often uses 32bit integer processing, while the VSTs always uses double floating point processing) the results cancel out with typically a residual noise of -140dBFS (with 24 bit FLAC files) or even less for higher external bit depths. How can this precise emulation be helpful? In my use-case I am using a command-line based toolchain for generating band notation videos from a text file score in the lilypond notation language plus some configuration file telling about instruments and audio postprocessing etc. In that tool-chain generation of those notation videos with audio tracks can be done by command-line open-source tools from text files _without any human intervention_. Important part of this tool-chain is SoX, because raw audio generation from MIDI often needs some beefing up by an audio processor (if you're interested, you can find details on this approach at GitHub https://github.com/prof-spock/LilypondToBandVideoConverter). Of course, since a configuration-driven generation is not very interactive by nature, you sometimes just have to tweak effect settings or instruments directly. Hence I am using a DAW on intermediate audio files of the tool-chain and fiddle with the audio postprocessing there to get the necessary parameters for the command line tool-chain. Understandably a spiffy user interface is _not at all_ a priority in this project, but only the correct reproduction of the SoX algorithms with adequate (slider or combobox) parametrisation. Also the parameter ranges in the UI are somewhat debatable, but they simply reflect the wide parameter ranges of the associated SoX command-line effect. Because SoX has rich command line options for its effects, not every effect configuration from SoX can be transported into the slider oriented GUI of a VST. E.g. the compander of SoX allows the definition of a transfer function having multiple segments. Although the internal engine of the VST compander implements exactly the same internal segment logic, the user interface only allows the typical definition of a threshold, a soft knee and a compression ratio (giving a total of three segments). All in all, the following SoX effects are available in this package: allpass, band, bandpass, bandreject, bass, biquad, compand, equalizer, gain, highpass, lowpass, mcompand, overdrive, phaser, reverb, treble and tremolo The time-variant effects phaser and tremolo are time-locked (see documentation for details); hence the rendering can be exactly synchronized to externally rendered audio snippets. Documentation is available at https://github.com/prof-spock/SoX-Plugins/raw/master/SoXPlugins-documentation.pdf, the package itself is at https://github.com/prof-spock/SoX-Plugins . Hope this is helpful for you. Best regards Thomas -------------------- P.S.: This project is a derivative work based on the foundations laid by the SoX community. Although the algorithms used were modified and redesigned, this project would been much more complicated and tedious without this basis. Hence my thanks go to Chris Bagwell, Nick Bailey, Daniel Pouzzner, Måns Rullgård, Rob Sewell and all the other contributors of the SoX project: without your effort this would not have been possible! _______________________________________________ Sox-users mailing list Sox-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sox-users
