Walkero

These days I am working on a very nice project which has to do with simple music compositing inside a web browser. I thought to use the fine SoX which can do many things with the processing of sounds. I am using it to combine sound series and then mix a few of them. I need to export the sounds as OGG and MP3 files. The OGG files will be used by most of the HTML5 ready browser and there is a fallback with flash that will use the MP3 files. Even if a browser doesn't support the OGG file it will automatically use the MP3 file.

I am working the project on my laptop where I have installed Linux Mint 12, with the SoX v14.3.2 installed from it's repository. With this version I didn't have any problem on encoding the MP3 files. But on my web server I have a Debian 6 installed, where the SoX application is v14.3.1. Unfortunately, this version doesn't support encoding to MP3 files because of a bug.

The only way that I managed to install SoX v.14.3.2 in Debian 6 without problems is the following:

First of all I used a testing repository by adding the following line at the /etc/apt/sources.list.

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free

Then I did the following steps:

# aptitude update
# aptitude remove '?name(sox)'
# aptitude install -t testing sox libsox-fmt-all

After these steps I have the SoX v14.3.2 installed on my webserver. Then I marked the testing repository at the /etc/apt/sources.list so that I won't accidentally update any other stable application with unstrable one.