play mp3 or wav file via Linux command line

Question

I would like to make an alarm system backed by a Ubuntu (no graphical interface) box, which plays various announcement and alarm audio tracks (.mp3 or .wav) via the command line.

For example:

$ root> audioplay ./hello.wav

The audio should come from the PC audio jack. I might also wrap it with another socket listener. (e.g. Ruby Sinatra)

Any ideas how I can do this?

Answer 1

mpg123 is a command-line utility which plays mp3 files. You can install it in Ubuntu with:

sudo apt-get install mpg123

Answer 2

The play command from the sox package will play any file format supported by sox using the default audio device, e.g

$ play something.mp3
$ play something.wav

You may need to install extra packages to gain support for all formats, for example on Ubuntu 11.04 the MP3 support is not available until you install libsox-fmt-mp3.

Answer 3

The most standard way to play a WAV file in Linux is using the aplay command, which is part of the ALSA system.

aplay [flags] [filename [filename]] ...

aplay a.wav

Links: (Wikipedia) (aplay man page)

(Both in Fedora and in Ubuntu/Mint it is part of the alsa-utils package)

This does not require any additional packages to your Linux installation like sox or mplayer or vlc, just the basic ALSA which is a part of any system nowadays.

Answer 4

Install vlc by using:

sudo apt-get install vlc vlc-plugin-pulse mozilla-plugin-vlc

Make sure that you have all repositories open. Also run the following before you install:

sudo apt-get update

VLC has a command-line operation method invoked by cvlc. The next part would be to write a .sh that will call the command. I am no good at writing bash scripts. The end-result would be something like:

cvlc xyz.mp3
cvlc --play-and-exit done.mp3 

Answer 5

You can simply pipe your sound data to the pc speaker device:

cat rawsound | /dev/pcsp

Answer 6

On Ubuntu 16.04, there is no need to install anything. You can play a sound using paplay [audio] with is part of the PulseAudio sound server :

paplay mysound.mp3

Answer 7

mplayer is another player which can play pretty much any audio/video format from command line. to install it in ubuntu just execute this command:

sudo apt-get install mplayer

you can then play the file using this syntax:

mplayer [path to file]

good luck!

Answer 8

adding an answer for people that will pass here (question is 2011 old, my now is 2019), because I found another way:

ffmpeg is installed on my ubuntu 19.04

So:

$ ffplay music.mp3 

-nodisp
hide spectrum analyzer

-nostats
hide cursor/file informations

-hide_banner
hide build informations


hide all (no output):
$ ffplay music.mp3 -nodisp -nostats -hide_banner

enjoy

Answer 9

canberra-gtk-play

For simple bash scripts mplayer is probably a bit too heavy and too verbose in terms of output. A built-in option is canberra-gtk-play which comes preinstalled on ubuntu:

canberra-gtk-play --file=/usr/share/sounds/gnome/default/alerts/drip.ogg

Note: it uses the alerts volume, and you must pass --file= in order to play a file from a path.

It can also play a sound by id which represents the file name without extension of media files under /usr/share/sounds (apparently this only works for sounds that are registered as part of a sound theme):

canberra-gtk-play --id="desktop-login"

canberra-gtk-play --id="message"

gst-launch-1.0/gst-launch-0.10

Another option is using the gstreamer command line tools which are present on most modern linux boxes:

gst-launch-1.0 playbin uri=file:///usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/message.ogg

To suppress all output redirect it to /dev/null:

gst-launch-1.0 playbin uri=file:///usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/message.ogg > /dev/null 2>&1

Both gst-launch-1.0 and gst-launch-0.10 might be present on your system.