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 (for example, Ruby Sinatra).
How can I do this?
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.
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.
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
On Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus), 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
You can simply pipe your sound data to the pc speaker device:
cat rawsound | /dev/pcsp
I found another way:
FFmpeg is installed on my Ubuntu 19.04 (Disco Dingo)
So:
$ ffplay music.mp3
-nodisp
hide spectrum analyzer
-nostats
hide cursor/file information
-hide_banner
hide build information
Hide all (no output):
$ ffplay music.mp3 -nodisp -nostats -hide_banner
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]
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"
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.
You can play all sound files (mp3, wav, ogg etc) via ffplay
ffplay -nodisp -autoexit ticktock.mp3
ffmpeg is very powerful and you can steam it to other sockets as well as sound cards.
