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This article reviews all the most common command line tools for manipulating and listening to audio formats on Linux. Players, editors, encoders/decoders, tag editors, music servers, they are all here. Currently it includes no less than 18 CLI (Command Line Interface) tools.
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This article reviews all the most common command line tools for manipulating and listening to audio formats on Linux. Players, editors, encoders/decoders, tag editors, music servers, they are all here. Currently it includes no less than 18 CLI (Command Line Interface) tools.
ogg123 - Ogg Vorbis player
ogg123 is a simple Ogg Vorbis player capable of reading the song's tags and displaying detailed information about it. It's included in the vorbis-tools package, and the source is available for download here. You can play more than one file, for example running it like this: ogg123 ~/music/pink_floyd*.ogg.
Official website
mpg123 - MP3 player
This is a command line player for MP3 files, very similar with ogg123. In Debian I noticed that if the OSS module is not loaded, mpg123 will fail to play since the default script in/etc/alternatives/ tells it to use OSS, so I recommend to either load the OSS module, change the symbolic link, create an alias or run it as /usr/bin/mpg123.bin .
Official website
music123 - audio player
music123 is a player which behaves much like ogg123 and mpg123, with the ability to play Ogg Vorbis, MP3 or WAV. I'm not very sure about the official website, but your distribution should include it. On Debian, use apt-get install music123 as root to install it. The nice thing about music123 is that it can play any files you have a player for, just by editing the configuration file, /etc/music123rc.
cmus - audio player
This is a great player based on ncurses with an intuitive interface and a Vi-style of using it. For example, typing :a ~/music/ will add directory ~/music/ to the library while :q will quit the application. For those who like the Vi editor, cmus will probably make a great audio player for command line. The last version is 2.2.0. There is also a Last.fm patch for it available here, but you'll have to apply it and then compile cmus if it's not already compiled with support for Last.fm.
Official website
oggenc - Ogg Vorbis encoder
This is the official encoder from Xiph.org, and it's included in the vorbis-tools package. oggenc can encode from FLAC, WAV or raw audio to Ogg Vorbis, and it supports many options, like target bitrate, quality, minimum and maximum bitrates and many more. To encode FLAC to Vorbis at 192 kbps, you will only need to issue a command like oggenc -b 192 audio_file.flac.
Official website
flac - FLAC encoder/decoder
FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio format which gained more and more popularity lately due to its high compression rates. flac is a tool which encodes and decodes FLAC files and can also convert Microsoft WAV (Waveform Audio Format) to FLAC. flac takes many command line options, offering the option to select the compression level or fill in tags when encoding among many others. The usual use would be flac -d audio_file.wav to decode a WAV file and encode it in FLAC, or flac audio_file.flac to convert a FLAC file to WAV.
Official website
cdparanoia - audio CD ripper
This is the well-known audio CD ripper. cdparanoia reads audio CDs and rips the tracks to WAV files, offering several ways of doing it: tou can select only certain tracks to rip, or point it to rip from a given time to another (e.g. to rip from minutes 1:20 up to 2:50 or so). The simplest way to run it is cdparanoia -B, which will rip the entire audio CD to WAV tracks.
Official website
ripit - audio CD ripper and audio convertor
ripit is a Perl script which converts tracks already ripped from an audio CD to Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3 or M4A audio files, given that a CD ripper like cdparanoia is already installed. It accepts plenty parameters, like the output format, quality or bitrate.
Official website
vorbiscomment - Ogg Vorbis tag editor
This tool is also part of the vorbis-tools package and allows you to edit tags for Ogg Vorbis audio files. You can easily use this in scripts to edit tags in mass for fields which are the same for several audio files (like the album name for example).
Official website
mp3blaster - MP3 player
mp3blaster is one of the most popular player for command line, using a TUI (Text User Interface). It might be a little harder to manipulate it for the first time, but once you get to learn how using it, mp3blaster will definitely be a good choice. The last version is 3.2.3, released in August 2006.
Official website
ogginfo - Ogg Vorbis information
Another utility from Xiph.org, ogginfo shows detailed information about an Ogg file.
Official website
sox - powerful sound manipulation tool
It stands for Sound Exchange and it's a very powerful tool for manipulating audio files on command line. It encodes/decodes various formats, converts between them and offers functions to apply sound effects. This tool is also called the 'Swiss Army Knife for audio manipulation', and it definitely deserves this nickname. It can be used as an audio player too (using either sox or the play command, which is a symbolic link to /usr/bin/sox, at least on Debian Lenny).
Official website
mpd - music server
mpd (Music Player Daemon) is a music server which can play various audio formats in combination with a client, like mpc (Music Player Command). There are also GUI clients for mpd, like Sonata.
Official website
xmms2 - music server
This is another music server supporting many formats and a powerful library. The official website was down at the time of writing.
Official website
cutmp3 - MP3 split application
This is a small tool which helps you cut and concatenate MP3 files from command line. It can cut specified sections from an MP3 file and create a new one, without quality loss.
Official website
mp3info - MP3 information utility
mp3info is a tool which shows information about MP3 encoded files, like tag information or detailed technical info about the specified MP3 file. For example:
mp3info -p %Q audio_file.mp3
Will show the sampling frequency in hertz. mp3info can be used as a tag editor too.
Official website
cuebreakpoints - CUE/TOC file reader
This tool comes handy in combination with shnsplit when you have large albums in a single FLAC or WAV file and a TOC/CUE file to split it. cuebreakpoints reads track breakpoints from CUE or TOC files and can be used in combination with shnsplit to split large FLAC or WAV files into separate melodies. Available in the package cuetools.
Official website
shnsplit - WAV/FLAC file data processing
In combination with cuebreakpoints, shnsplit helps you split large FLAC or WAV files into separate songs. For example, to split a FLAC file using a specified CUE file, one would issue:
cuebreakpoints audio_disc.cue | shnsplit audio_disc.flac
shnsplit is available in the package shntool.
Official website
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