Ogg Vorbis is an open source audio compression format (not proprietary, like mp3!). I recently needed to play / manipulate .ogg sound files that I downloaded from LibriVox, an excellent repository of free audiobooks. The sound manipulation program SoX can encode and decode Ogg Vorbis files, but requires the installation of additional libraries first.
After compiling and installing SoX 14.3.0 on Ubuntu 9.04, I tried to convert an Ogg Vorbis file to WAV format, but received the following error:
$ sox filename.ogg filename.wav
sox FAIL formats: no handler for detected file type ‘vorbis’
Another sign that something was wrong was the following output from running ./configure before compiling SoX:
OPTIONAL FILE FORMATS
oggvorbis…………………….no
To fix this problem and enable the use of Ogg Vorbis files with SoX, I did the following:
$ sudo apt-get install vorbis-tools
In addition I downloaded and installed libogg and libvorbis from Xiph.Org (in that order, since libvorbis depends on libogg). After that, I re-configured SoX, and saw
OPTIONAL FILE FORMATS
oggvorbis…………………….yes
Then, after re-compiling and re-installing, SoX was able to process the Ogg Vorbis file.
