Installing “SoX” (Sound eXchange) via the Terminal in Mac OS X

Probably better on superuser? Based on the and /Users I am guessing you are on Mac OS X?

If all you did was git clone it down, you have the source code to the application and not a binary.

You would need to cd sox-folder and then do the ./configure && make && make install dance. But as you say you are new to this, that might be a bit rough.

If you are on Mac OS X then something like Homebrew or MacPorts might help you here, as they both have packages/ports for SoX. If you are not on Mac OS X, most distribution of *nix will have a package available (i.e. yum install sox, apt-get install sox, etc…) but more information would be needed.

If you just want to run sox, go here and grab the precompiled Mac OS X Binary: sox-14.3.2-macosx.zip. To compile what you have you will need autoconf, automake, etc… Basically the entire autotools toolchain, and that is probably overkill assuming you just want to run the utility.

This article explains in detail to have SoX running in Ubuntu. It worked for me, so I think it should work for you too

Edit:

Simplest way in ubuntu would be to run these two commands

sudo apt-get install libasound2-plugins libasound2-python libsox-fmt-all

sudo apt-get install sox

If you are in some other Linux, like CentOS or you need support for Vorbis and Ogg, you will have to compile from source, found by following the link above

I used Homebrew to install sox for me with the command

brew install sox

And, assuming I am using the bash shell instead of the default zsh as of 2020, I would add the following to the hidden .bash_profile in the home directrly for sox to be picked up

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH"

This I normally do after installing Homebrew for the first time. You only need to add this to the .bash_profile once.