How can I play a song in the background via my command line?

command-line bash music sox

18,197

Solution 1

Backgrounding play with & fails because play wants to output its status, e.g.

In:12.7% 00:00:27.31 [00:03:07.52] Out:1.20M [!=====|=====!] Hd:0.0 Clip:0

but cannot if backgrounded. So it keeps waiting until aborted.

To solve this, simply run play with the -q (quiet) switch. This will successfully background it and play will terminate when the song ends.

(sleep 10 ; play -q Desktop/SONGS/01\ -\ Oh\ Baby\ Girl.mp3 ) &

You can stop it by either typing killall play (if no other play instances are running), or by kill $! (if you haven't backgrounded other processes in the same terminal after starting play -- $! gives you the PID of the last backgrounded process)

Solution 2

there is a better way of running things in the "background" from the command line.

sudo apt-get install tmux

Its one of the most nifty command line programs for Linux. it allows you to have something similar to "tabs in a browser" and switching seamlessly between them without any interruption of running programs. It's not tabs in the terminal program itself though. But within that specific shell you have started.

once install start it by typing

tmux

in a terminal.

you create new "tabs" with ctrl-A c you switch to next tab with ctrl-A n

here is a more thorough tutorial if you find the man pages hard to understand

Solution 3

This worked for me with mplayer

nohup mplayer  SomeSong.mp4 > /dev/null 2>&1 &

18,197

Ant's

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Ant's over 1 year
I have installed play :
```
sudo apt-get install sox libsox-fmt-mp3
```
I can now play my audio files like this :
```
play Desktop/SONGS/01\ -\ Oh\ Baby\ Girl.mp3
```
Since I'm learning shell, I wish I could do something like this :
```
 (sleep 10 ; play Desktop/SONGS/01\ -\ Oh\ Baby\ Girl.mp3 ) &
```
After 10 sec's, I can see the screen as :
```
 File Size: 7.38M     Bit Rate: 260k
  Encoding: MPEG audio    Info: 2012
  Channels: 2 @ 16-bit   Track: 01/09
Samplerate: 44100Hz      Album: Maalai Pozhudhin Mayakathilaey :::tunesinn.blogspot.com:::
Replaygain: off         Artist: Hemachandra, Achu
  Duration: 00:03:46.98  Title: Oh Baby Girl
```
But the song is not playing. But if I do this (without &) :
```
(sleep 10 ; play Desktop/SONGS/01\ -\ Oh\ Baby\ Girl.mp3 ) 
```
Is working as expected. But I couldn't able to use my terminal in meanwhile.

How could I resolve my problem, with using &?
- Dyde almost 12 years
  
  If you only want a CLI player so that you can play audio in the background, I would highly recommend you to try cmus. It even has a script cmuscrobbler for last.fm and you can map global hotkeys in X window system via cmus-remote. Or you could try using an utility like screen.
Ant's almost 12 years

This works. But how come now I stop playing the song?
ish almost 12 years

You can stop it by either typing killall play (if no other play instances are running), or by kill $! (if you haven't backgrounded other processes in the same terminal after starting play -- $! gives you the PID of the last backgrounded process)
Kathy001 almost 11 years

Adjust as needed. Play with the effects options, see the sox manpage for more on that... manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/raring/en/man1/sox.1.html
gertvdijk almost 11 years

How does this answer the question regarding running this from the command line? Your answer seems to be about Nautilus, a GUI-enabled file manager. It's a nice answer, but for a different question.
Kathy001 almost 11 years

Because its a quick and cool way to do this even though its not a command line answer. Couldn't find a question to fit the answer in this case.