Play MP3 or WAV file via the Linux command line

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

sudo apt-get install mpg123

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 

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

cat rawsound | /dev/pcsp