Multimedia :: using play on the command line



Ive not been able to play a wav file as yet with mpg123 mpg321 .. It says its decoding but nothing plays from the speakers.. The output device is libao by defualt but whats that ?? Too many ambigiuos arguments on the help texts to make any sense .. Why cant I just go with "mpg123 mywavfile.wav" ??

I need a light weight player from the command line that just plays wavs and finds the sound system by itself so it can be used in a DSL package that should run on most if not all systems..

I dont care for MP3s frankly in this case.. By the time a old system machine has managed to uncompress and play a MP3 file the reason for the sound event is lost or its killed the system with overheads and lame encoders..

Still can not figure out where the play binary has come from on the USB install .. Will have to look at that too .. This whole thing is rather interesting as well as solving a problem its become an education..
mpg321 can write to a wav file, but that does not mean it can take a wav as input. I'm guessing that the wav output is available because a decompressed mp3 is essentially the same as a wav, so writing the decompressed data to a file is a trivial matter. Maybe adding the code to play a wav directly was more than the developers wanted to bother with?

sox is a pretty feature-rich application designed to play/modify/convert multiple formats, so I guess that would mean a relatively large size for a commandline program. If you want a tiny program that only plays wav files, I'd recommend wavplay, or bplay as curaga suggested.
Quote (wavetel @ Oct. 03 2007,10:30)
Nope NO Extensions saved on the USB stick at all.. Try it .. Boot from a DSL CD and open a command line and type "play" .. Its not there anywhere ..

Now install to a USB stick and dont install any exts or anything extra .. Boot that USB stick up and open a console and type "play" again.. Hey now its there .. Ive done this with DSL v2 3 and 4 .. I thought a USB install was just a CD image across to a bootable USB stick but there is something else going on there.. I dont understand it as yet.. You will find play at /usr/bin/play on a USB install from memory.

Well Ive figured alot of things out.. First off I was dead wrong about the Play binary appearing on the USB install .. It did creep into the system via a DSL ext that I never expected it to be in. That explains that one. I looked deep into the ext and found it there. Just assuming you know everything thats in the ext is a trap.

I grabbed the deb file for bplay and made a bplay.dsl ext and that works well. Problem solved I guess. The bplay ext turns out to be about 9k as compared to the sox ext at 477k or so.

Thanks for your guidance and input folks.
If you think the extension might help others, please consider submitting it to extensions@damnsmalllinux.org
All you need to do is to make a .md5 and .info
Quote (^thehatsrule^ @ Oct. 06 2007,14:46)
If you think the extension might help others, please consider submitting it to extensions@damnsmalllinux.org
All you need to do is to make a .md5 and .info

I posted the extension off a couple of days ago but nothing as yet on the testing area. Made a md5 and info file up and posted them as 3 separate attachments. There isnt much info on exactly how they want it submitted so maybee they dont like it or just think its too insignificant. Who knows.
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