How to play mp3 files from the command line?

Question

I have installed Ubuntu 11.10 server.. so command line only.

I need to be able to play audio (.mp3 & .wav) files via the command line!

I've installed the MPD & Audacious packages... and copied some files to a location specified in the .conf file.

But what do I do to acutally play the .mp3 files??

Also, how can I confirm the AUDIO is working correctly?

You want to play it from the 'server' speakers or you want to play it across the network? Two very different things. — RobotHumans, Mar 23 '12 at 12:17
You could try installing sox, then at the commandline it would be "play thisorthat.mp3" or "play ~/music/thisfolder/thisorthat.mp3" — deleted, Jul 03 '13 at 22:12

score 85 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '23 at 19:14

85

If you already have ffmpeg installed (you should have ffmpeg installed default with ubuntu), try:

ffplay example.mp3

or (without text output, window opening and looping):

ffplay -v 0 -nodisp -autoexit example.mp3

or reading from stdin, piped from a command:

cat example.mp3 | ffplay -v 0 -nodisp -autoexit -

edited Apr 13 '23 at 19:14

Volker Siegel

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answered Jul 03 '13 at 20:47

user1933565

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While it does play, it also opens up a GUI window. – Elijah Lynn Apr 06 '17 at 17:01
15

-nodisp option makes it not open a GUI window. – weronika Sep 18 '17 at 12:46
3

it seems to keep running after it finishes playing the audio. – Anon Sep 30 '17 at 15:29
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On my system at least ffplay -loop 9999 sound.wav also seamlessly loops the audio. – Michael Sep 08 '18 at 17:45
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This is the one I use ffplay -nodisp -autoexit sound.ogg >/dev/null 2>&1 – Paradiesstaub Jan 07 '19 at 15:20
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You can also use ffplay -v warning -nodisp -autoexit sound.ogg as an alternative to still see warnings – Christian Feb 15 '20 at 22:14

score 74 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 23 '12 at 14:38

74

For wav you can use aplay. For mp3 you can use mpg123.

answered Mar 23 '12 at 14:38

psusi

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Perfect, works great with sudo pip install gTTS (Google Text to Speech/https://github.com/pndurette/gTTS) then gtts-cli "The good of mankind far outweighs the bad" | mpg123 -. – Elijah Lynn Apr 06 '17 at 17:06
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mpg321 is a good option. – Henry Feb 06 '19 at 07:08

score 18 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 23 '12 at 14:51

18

I usually just do mplayer foo.mp3 to play audio from the command line.

answered Mar 23 '12 at 14:51

mlevin

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mplayer --vo=null musicClip.mp4 disables the video if you want just the music. – loxaxs Jan 01 '18 at 22:42

score 15 · Answer 4 · edited Sep 12 '21 at 22:12

15

The play command from the sox package will play any file format supported by sox

To install sox open terminal and run:

sudo apt-get install sox libsox-fmt-all

To use play command:

play file_name.extension

Use man sox for more information

_{reference here}

edited Sep 12 '21 at 22:12

x5657

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answered Oct 19 '15 at 02:51

Ravan

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score 13 · Answer 5 · edited Jun 22 '19 at 01:30

Not sure if your server will support it, but VLC also has a command line version that can play (with the right packages) MP3 files:

nvlc file.mp3

The 'n' in front of 'vlc' invokes the ncurses interface which is for the command line. This allows you to play multiple files, pause and control the files being played.

And additionally you can use nvlc --random /path/to/your/music/folder to play random songs from a Music folder.

Or use cvlc instead of nvlc, for even minimal interaction.

score 8 · Answer 6 · answered Mar 23 '12 at 12:23

8

You can test the sound quite simply: speaker-test -c6 (where -c6 indicates I want to test 6 channels for a 5.1 setup)

But for playing music, mpd is just a server.

It needs a frontend to tell it to do things. Check out mpc for a fairly basic command line player. There are of course many, many clients (including graphical ones you can connect over the network) so you can play around with those.

answered Mar 23 '12 at 12:23

Oli

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Excellent, thanks for the speaker-test.... worked great. I'll also check out mpc. – user51760 Mar 23 '12 at 15:15

score 5 · Answer 7 · answered Feb 09 '20 at 21:16

ffplay has -loglevel quiet, so no need to redirect output to the platform-specific /dev/null. So, building on others' answers,

ffplay -nodisp -autoexit -loglevel quiet filename.{wav,mp3,ogg,...}

Try ffplay -formats, see https://www.ffmpeg.org/ffplay.html.

score 2 · Answer 8 · answered Jun 22 '19 at 05:08

mpv is a descendant of mplayer, which mlevin mentions. Many of the old command line switches still work, but some of the keyboard shortcuts have changed.

It also has the ability to "play" folders (by queuing all media files contained within).

mpv --vo=null -shuffle .

score 2 · Answer 9 · answered Jun 19 '21 at 21:25

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Just discovered this terminal dedicated music player:

Install package "moc" and launch mocp for a cool visual terminal music player (with no risk of making pop-ups of cover art, etc, like `mplayer1 does)

answered Jun 19 '21 at 21:25

CPBL

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Great option, when it works. I get it to work on my main machine, but not on the machine with the music collection from which I want it to work :| ... aplay plays wav files fine, but mocp claims it cannot open the ALSA device ... neither can cmus. Very frustrating. – 0xC0000022L Jan 20 '24 at 21:22

jarno · Answer 10 · 2018-06-02T05:06:48.307

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You told you have audacious installed. You can play audio file in command line by audacious -Hq file.

edited Jun 02 '18 at 05:06

answered Oct 18 '15 at 14:57

jarno

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actually it should be -Hq, not -hq... but yes. And omg why is this not the accepted answer?? – Dale C. Anderson Jun 01 '18 at 16:55

score 1 · Answer 11 · answered Nov 29 '19 at 21:42

If someone finds this answer looking how to play audio in a script, we ended up using a Python package called playsound:

https://github.com/TaylorSMarks/playsound

Playsound is implemented in pure Python and works in almost any Linux, OSx and Windows. No external command required. At it supports MP3 and HTTPS URIs too!

How to use it?

sudo pip3 install playsound
python3 -c 'from playsound import playsound; playsound("https://your.domain/sound.mp3")'

Or, again, if scripting or coding in Python, incorporate it in your code.

user178267 · Answer 12 · 2016-11-24T06:41:09.457

1

Using smplayer to play audio .m4a files

cd ~/Music/Songs_m4a
smplayer .

This is SMPlayer v. 0.8.6 running on Linux.

NOTE: No interface displayed. It just play all the audio files in the folder.

edited Nov 24 '16 at 06:41

answered Nov 24 '16 at 05:08

user178267

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How to play mp3 files from the command line?

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