Ogg Like MP3

For various reasons, I needed to be able to convert sound files from Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) to MP3. The default method to do this is via SoX (Sound eXchange), "the swiss army knife of sound processing programs." Say, for example, I had a copy of the Beatle's "Yesterday" in Ogg format. Then I should be able to do this:

$ sox yesterday.ogg yesterday.mp3

Funny thing, though, is that because of some fears about copyright, Fedora Core doesn't ship with any MP3 libraries. So, in this case, we'd get the message:

$ sox: Unknown output file format for 'yesterday.mp3': File type 'mp3' is not known

It didn't take long for Google (TM) to find a solution, in the form of this thread on freshrpms-list, which tells you how to get an MP3 enabled SoX file. Basically

1. Download sox-12.17.5-3.fr.i386.rpm and sox-devel-12.17.5-3.fr.i386.rpm from
   http://ftp.us.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/testing/3/sox-12.17.5-3.fr/
2. Remove the old SoX files. This takes a bit of doing, because there may be some dependencies:
   $ sudo rpm -e sox sox-devel --nodeps
3. Install the new files (maybe --update would have worked?):
   $ sudo rpm -i sox*.rpm

So far it works.