aplay is a command-line audio file player for the ALSA sound card driver. It supports several

file formats A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file formats ...

and multiple sound cards with multiple devices. For supported soundfile formats, the

sampling rate In signal processing, sampling is the reduction of a continuous-time signal to a discrete-time signal. A common example is the conversion of a sound wave to a sequence of "samples". A sample is a value of the signal at a point in time and/or spac ...

, bit depth, and so forth can be automatically determined from the soundfile header.

Example

aplay -c 1 -t raw -r 22050 -f mu_law foobar

Will play the raw file "foobar" as a 22050-Hz, mono, 8-bit, mu-law .au file.

External links

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Linux audio video-related software {{linux-stub