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

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

Answer 4

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

$aplay a.wav

Links: (Wikipedia) (aplay man page)

(In Fedora it is part of the alsa-utils, and in Ubuntu the package likely has the same name.)

This does not require any additional packages like sox or mplayer or vlc, just ALSA.

Answer 5

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

cat rawsound | /dev/pcsp