Install Sox Locally
Repo
Background
Sox has been instrumental in audio processing and manipulation and is known as the Swiss Army Knife of sound processing programs. Everything is ok when I use my personal server on which Sox is preinstalled via root. However, I found installing Sox on a group server challenging, where installing Sox calls for root permission and operation.
Install with Root on Linux
Typically, installing Sox should be more than easy if you are the root of a Linux server.
1 | sudo apt update |
Install Sox without root
This section is the core of this blog. I will address two methods to install Sox locally.
Install from source
Install from source is to download the source code and install manually.
First, we go to the user root directory or an assigned directory to download the source code.
1 | cd ~ |
Next, we unzip the source code.
1 | tar xvfz sox-14.4.2.tar.gz |
Next, use the configuration file inside ~/sox-14.4.2 to check the destination system’s configuration and available features to ensure the project can be built. Please be reminded that the --prefix argument requires an absolute path format.
1 | ./configure --prefix=$HOME/sox-14.4.2 |
Next, we build the project.
1 | make && make install |
Last but not least, we add a Sox bin to our path. Edit your .bashrc file in your user root. Add the following line,
1 | export PATH="$SOX_DIR/bin:$PATH" |
$SOX_DIR should align with the --prefix argument where you made the configuration.
Install from conda-forge
The methods above usually take more than half an hour to complete. It is intolerable for someone in desperate need to use Sox. Days after, I ran into a much easier method to get Sox installed locally. All you need is a conda environment and one command line.
1 | conda create -n sox python=3.8 -y |
After that, you have Sox installed safe and sound.
More on conda-forge
conda-forge is more powerful than I previously assumed. According to their website, it is a channel that collects all the packages available in conda. A often-used tool htop also requires sudo permission to get installed, you can still use conda-forge to install it anyway without any root concerns. Just like
1 | conda install -c conda-forge htop |
What makes me even more surprised is that, although torch for m1 mac is not officially supported, we can install the osx-arm64 torch wheels from conda-forge. Although it still has some supporting issue, it can cover most using cases within torch.
Reference
Install Sox Locally