Music-related commands

cdplay play 1

Play the first track from a audio CD. Use cdplay to play the whole CD. Use cdplay stop when had enough.

eject

Get a free coffee cup holder :))). (Eject the CD ROM tray). This command defaults to the CDROM, but could be used to eject other removable media by specifying the mount point or device. E.g., I can eject the zipdisk from a parallel-port (external) zipdrive (as root) using: eject /dev/sda4.

I often use eject (as root) when the media does not want to eject when I press the button on the CDROM.

play my_file.wav

Play a wave file.

rec my_file.wav

Record a wave file from my microphone.

mpg123 my_file.mp3

Play an mp3 file.

mpg123 -w my_file.wav my_file.mp3

Create a wave audio file from an mp3 audio file. Useful if you wanted to write a regular audio CD from mp3s--you have to convert the mp3s to the *.wav format first. Don't be surprised the conversion is slow--decompressing mp3s is very processor intensive.

xmms &

(in X terminal) Nice GUI mp3 player.

freeamp &

(in X terminal) Another GUI mp3 player.

lame input_file output_file

MP3 encoder. You may need to download and install it yourself (standard Linux distributions avoid supplying it because of disagreement about patents on the mp3 compression technique).

knapster

(in X terminal) Start the program to download mp3 files that other users of napster have displayed for downloading. You may share your mp3s too. Really cool, while it lasts. Gnutella and FreeNet will soon replace them->it gets even cooler.

cdparanoia -B "1-"

(CD ripper) Read the contents of an audio CD and save it into wavefiles in the current directories, one track per wavefile. The "1-" means "from track 1 to the last". -B forces putting each track into a separate file.

grip&

(in X terminal) A GUI to ripping (see the previous command).

playmidi my_file.mid

Play a midi file. playmidi -r my_file.mid will display text mode effects on the screen.

sox audio_file another_format_audio_file

(="SOund eXchange") Convert from almost any audio file format to another (but not mp3s). See man sox for the list of supported audio file formats (many). sox also lets you add special effects to your sound file.

kscd

(in X terminal) CD player.

kmidi

(in X terminal) MIDI player.

kmid

(in X terminal) MIDI/caraoke player.

kmix

(in X terminal) Sound mixer.

studio&

(in Xterminal) Sound Studio--edit sound files, add effects, etc. Available on the on the PowerTools CD, RH7.x.

extace&

(in Xterminal) Sound visualization utility.

festival --tts my_file.txt

Say the content of the my_file.txt file (ascii text). "festival" is a speach synthesizer that comes on the RedHat 7.0 "Linux PowerTools" CD. To say something from the command line, you need to start up "festival" and then, at the "festival>" prompt, type the appropriate command ("scheme" language interpreter), as in this example (bold represents the prompt):

festival

festival>(SayText "good dog, really good dog")

festival> (quit)