I've run into a very odd problem. I use gnump3d to stream my music to work from my house and it uses sox and oggenc in a pipe to downsample the music to be more bandwidth friendly. This has worked fine until the latest sox upgrade in slackware-current.

More specifically, using the older version of sox that come with Slack (sox-12.17.8) I have no problems. When the downsampling is finished sox exits. I use this pipe in this version of sox:

downsample_high_ogg = sox -c 2 -t ogg $FILENAME -t raw - | oggenc --raw -b 96 -
downsample_medium_ogg = sox -c 2 -t ogg $FILENAME -t raw - | oggenc --raw -b 64 -
downsample_low_ogg = sox -t ogg $FILENAME -t raw - | oggenc --raw --downmix --resample 22050 -b 32 -

Those are the three lines in gnump3d.conf that corrispond to the three levels of downsampling. However, when I upgrade to sox-12.18.1 I have to update the pipes to:

downsample_high_ogg = sox -c 2 -t ogg $FILENAME -t raw -s - | oggenc --raw -b 96 -
downsample_medium_ogg = sox -c 2 -t ogg $FILENAME -t raw -s - | oggenc --raw -b 64 -
downsample_low_ogg = sox -t ogg $FILENAME -t raw -s - | oggenc --raw --downmix --resample 22050 -b 32 -

These actually work and I get sound, however, sox does not exit when it is finished with a track. I end up with an instance of sox just hanging about in memory for each track I've played and eventually my system grinds to a halt.

I have no idea what the cause is. Google hasn't been much help for me but I may be searching on the wrong terms. Anyone have any suggestions on what I might try to get sox to terminate correctly?

Thanks,

Brian

If no one knows the exact answer, that's OK. However, if anyone has a suggestion on what I could try that may lead to more info that would be a good place to start.

Thanks,

Brian

Just did a quick test of your commands with a 30 second sample, and everything seems to be working here (running -current too): The downsampled file was succesfuly created and no SoX procces was left running.

Maybe you've hit on a SoX or lib{vorbis,ogg} bug.

My suggestion would be:
Try using oggdec instead of SoX.

EDIT: Now, if you want to try and see what's wrong, you could strace SoX and see if you find any weird behavior (like an endless loop, or SoX waiting for a signal/event).

Hey, now that's a good idea. I don't know why I didn't think of it! I change it to use oggdec instead and it seems to be working fine now.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Brian