I am looking for instructions on how to use Sox. I haven't found anything through Googling and the sourceforge page is not very instructive.

I also want to convert mp2 to mp3. Am I corrct in thinking that
sox input.mp2 output.mp3 will do the job.

Tha nks.

The man page (man sox) has the documentation and examples. The command you listed will work, but you may want to tune the parameters a bit.

How about something like...

for file in *.mp2; do
echo "Converting $file to "$(basename "$file" .mp2).mp3""
sox -t mp2 "$file" -t mp3 -w -s -c 2 "$(basename "$file" .mp2).mp3"
done

Something like that anyways. I'm not a very good programmer so it might need tweaked.

alan@LavanKossot:~/documents/radio$ sox 05171100.mp2 05171100.mp3
sox: Failed reading 05171100.mp2: Do not understand format type: mp2

alan@LavanKossot:~/documents/radio$ sox -t mp2 "05171100.mp2" -w -s -c2 "0517110.mp3"
sox: Unknown input file format for '05171100.mp2': File type 'mp2' is not known

A type of mp2 doesn't mean anything (see: man sox). For example, mp3 is just a shorthand for mpeg2 layer 3. If the audio was taken from a DVD, it may be a type of raw file, since it doesn't have any recognizable header. If you don't know how the audio was extracted, you'll need to experiment some.

The audio files are produced by a digital radio, Evoke 3 (see www.pure.com) which can record radio programs onto an SD chip but only save them as mp2 files. According to the instruction manual "EVOKE-3 records DAB radio to SD cards in MP2 format. You may need a computer to convert these files to a different format if you wish to use them in another device"

I want to listen to these files on my mp3 player. I have tried copying them over but the device does not even seem to see them. I can load them using audacity and export them as MP3 files but this is a bit tedious and I was hoping to do something from the command line.

The manufacturer at
http://pure.com/support/kb.asp?Refer...0767#Reference
recommends a shareware Windows program called Easy CD-DA Extractor

OK, it looks like sox is the wrong tool for this. You will need to use lame:

lame sample.mp2 sample.mp3

Lame specifically handles mpeg layer 2 input files.

I have discovered that the conversion can be dome with lame
lame --mp2input 05171100.mp2 05171100.mp3

ffmpeg works for me:

ffmpeg -i filename.mp2 -ar 48000 -ab 128 -ac 2 -acodec mp3 newfilename.mp3