BSD Unix® Toolbox: 1000+ Commands for FreeBSD®, OpenBSD, and NetBSD®

Chapter 6. Playing with Multimedia

IN THIS CHAPTER

Playing music with play, ogg123, and mpg321

Adjusting audio with alsamixer and aumix

Ripping music CDs with cdparanoia

Encoding music with oggenc, flac, and lame

Converting audio files with sox

Transforming digital images with convert

There's no need to go to a GUI tool, if all you need to do is play a song or convert an image or audio file to a different form. There are commands for working with multimedia files (audio or images) that are quick and efficient if you find yourself working from the shell. And if you need to manipulate batches of multimedia files, the same command you use to transform one file can be added to a script to repeat the process on many files.

This chapter focuses on tools for working with audio and digital image files from the shell.

Working with Audio

There are commands available for BSD systems that can manipulate files in dozens of audio formats. Commands such as ogg123, mpg321, and play can be used to listen to audio files. There are commands for ripping songs from music CDs and encoding them to store efficiently. There are even commands to let you stream audio so anyone on your network can listen to your playlist.

Starting with Audio

Your BSD system may not be configured to play sound when you first install it. If that's the case, you need to load the appropriate drivers for your sound card to work. The drivers for many popular sound cards are already included with FreeBSD. Here is a quick procedure to find and ...