#PLAY SOUND COMMAND HOW TO#

If you tried to feed afplay multiple files, you probably saw the admonishment that you вЂњmay only specify one file to play.вЂќ To a UNIX geek, thatвЂ™s just a suggestion to let venerable UNIX tools manage the files. (formerly iTunes) IвЂ™d like to explain that as an example of how powerful this tool is. This satisfies my wish to play a sequence of MP3 files without Music.app. Yup, thatвЂ™s our idea of fun here in nerdville. Not that IвЂ™m condoning this type of behavior, but I recently used the afplay command to play a pretty amusing prank on a coworker by SSHing into his work machine and forcing him to listen to a Miley Cyrus song, he didnвЂ™t figure out what was going on until it was over and I told him. ThatвЂ™ll end the process and music stream instantly.

Locate the PID for afplay as itвЂ™s running, then issue the command as follows: Or target the specific afplay process ID with kill -9:

This launches afplay into the background, if you want to shut it up you can just kill the afplay process with: Note the ampersand is at the back of the command. If youвЂ™d rather afplay run in the background while continuing to play the audio file, use this command:

#PLAY SOUND COMMAND HOW TO#

How to Play Audio Files in the Background from Command Line That doesnвЂ™t mean you canвЂ™t run music in the background though. You wonвЂ™t find any management utilities or syncing abilities within afplay. You can stop the audio any time with Control-C, otherwise the song will play itself through then terminate itself automatically when completed.ДonвЂ™t think of this as a terminal-based iTunes replacement (thereвЂ™s a cool app called ViTunes for that though), because itвЂ™s not, itвЂ™s more of just a way to play a variety of audio files from the command line without having to enter into any GUI app. Audio begins playing immediate, to stop the audio from playing you can hit CONTROL + C at the command line.Now type the following, using the path to the audio file you wish to play from the command line.Open the Terminal applicaiton found in /Applications/Utilities/.To use it yourself, here is what you would want to do: The afplay command is versatile and can play m4a, mp4, aac, aiff, wav, and many other audio file formats. How to Play Any Audio File from the Command Line Using PlaySound to Play Waveform-Audio FilesДЇor more examples of how to use PlaySound in your Win32-based applications, see Playing WAVE Resources.With the command line tool вЂafplayвЂ™ you can do just that, you can play practically any audio file format, whether itвЂ™s M4A, AAC, MP3, WAV, AIFF, or whatever else is on your Mac, and you can start the audio right from the Terminal.You can use PlaySound to play the sound synchronously or asynchronously, and to control the behavior of the function in other ways when it must share system resources.ДЇor more information about using PlaySound, see the following topics: The PlaySound function allows you to play a sound in a continuous loop, ending only when you call PlaySound again, specifying either NULL or the sound identifier of another sound for the pszSound parameter. As a system alert, using the alias stored in the WIN.INI file or the registry.

The PlaySound function allows you to specify a sound in one of three ways: To maximize the portability of your Win32-based application, use PlaySound, not sndPlaySound.) (The sndPlaySound function offers a subset of the capabilities of PlaySound. You can use the PlaySound function to play waveform audio if the sound fits into available memory.

Play sound command