**** XSOX: An X-windows frontend for the SOX Sound Converter program. ****
****         (c) 1996 Kees Lemmens; TU Delft The Netherlands.         ****
****                   Version 1.02 (BETA release)                    ****

General:

The SOX Sound Converter tool by Jef Poskanzer (1989) and many others is a
very powerful package, but it's main disadvantage is that is uses
commandline options that makes it very difficult to enter a command without
consulting the manualpages.

As I run into the Xforms package by T. Zhao and M. Overmars recently and was
quite impressed by the possiblities of this tool, I decided to write a nice
X-windows frontend for SOX, so it would be used more often by users not
familiar with the nasty commandline options.

The program provides for sliders, buttons, file selectors, format selectors,
etc. whose settings are used to compose a nice commandstring, that is passed
on to SOX afterwards.

WARNING: For this reason this package cannot run without having the SOX tool
on your system !!! However, it is available on most Public Domain sites.

There is also a play command, that simples passes the sox output through a
pipe to a program that is capable to play audio (i.e. vplay on Linux,
send_sound on HP etc). Of course playing will ony work on a system with
audio support ! The player process forks, so it is possible to continue
using Xsox while a tune is being played.

The player command is preset to 'vplay -r -b 8' (on Linux), but it can be
changed easily within Xsox if you need something else.

version 1.02:
------------

In this version the program uses multithreading to concatenate multiple sox
processes (one for each effect) and so it is able to i.e. resample, add echo
and use a highpassfilter at the same time !
However, as this starts a number of sox processes (instead of only one as in
version 1.01) it may need more processing power, depending on the number of
options, and especially with high sample rates.

Future:

The next version will have a record command ( in fact already imlemented in
my version at hoem here) and a simple graphical editor, based upon the X-Y
plot widget as available in Xforms.

Install:

With the binary distribution for Linux You need a Linux PC equipped with a
SoundCard.
Furthermore you'll need to have the 'SOX' command installed somewhere on your
searchpath and also (currently) the `VPLAY` command from the standard Linux
sndtools if you want ti be able to play the samples.

There are 2 versions in the binary package for Linux:

- a statically linked version that can run on any Linux PC
- a dynamic version that will only run if you have libXforms.so.0.* in your
  library search path.

The source code package will need a C-compiler, X-window library (only Xlib)
and of course the Xforms library and headerfile to compile the program. Maybe
you'll have to specify some compiler options and add some library paths in the
Makefile before it will build.

Comments:

If you have any comments, found any bugs or just want some extra features
to be added: write email to lemmens@dv.twi.tudelft.nl and I'll see what I
can do.