BASH command "play" does not produce sound

Pet3M0ss

Don't spend much time playing with multimedia on this old machine, but did happen to connect Amarok to "the Prairie Home Companion" last week (comes on at 6 am here). After seeing Crouse's tutorial that suggested using BASH for rec and play, I gave it a spin. Perhaps I can "cron" something useful (for me, at least).

The commands work (I think), but there is no real sound stored in the *.ogg files I made. The Amarok mixer shows some low end noise. I rebooted into Wolvix Hunter and tried Audacity and MPlayer with the same result. They play the radio fine but the shell command is not storing the sounds.

Tried shutting down the apps or just leaving them in "stopped" (before doing the play command) but nothing seems to help.

How would I check the files to see if they are correctly recorded?? What settings on a sound app should I be using to make this work?? I just don't know where to go from here.

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Slackware 12.2
Slax

Pet3M0ss · Posted: Sun Sep 09, 2025 1:32 pm Post subject:

Oops. I may have found an answer. The streaming radio is "MP3 encoded". Do the BASH commands only work with Vorbis and Amarok works with both Vorbis and MP3?? Do I have to stick with radio that does Vorbis??

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Slackware 12.2
Slax

crouse · Site Admin Joined: 17 Apr 2025 Posts: 11833 Location: Iowa

You may have to specify a "device" to record.

rec --device=DEVNAME filename.ogg

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Veronica - Arch Linux 64-bit -- Kernel 2.6.33.4-1
Archie/Jughead - Arch Linux 32-bit -- Kernel 2.6.33.4-1
Betty/Reggie - Arch Linux (VBox) 32-bit -- Kernel 2.6.33.4-1
BumbleBee - OpenSolaris-SunOS 5.11

Pet3M0ss · Posted: Sun Sep 09, 2025 11:42 pm Post subject:

I would assume the device= my soundcard then?

When I do "play", the sound starts a low hum, as if it is trying to play, so not specifying the device on the "rec" is where I am missing it.

Don't have time to ferret out man page possibilities, but the use of the command line would be an excellent mode for a distro-hopper like me to play stuff. There are so many sound apps that it's confusing.

Will report my findings. A little command line tweak might be good for the tutorial.

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Slackware 12.2
Slax

Pet3M0ss · Posted: Wed Sep 12, 2025 1:50 pm Post subject:

Hey! I got the sound to work but using a different command!!

arecord sample.ogg and aplay sample.ogg will do the job.

arecord -l will list devices, too.

Discovered the commands in my ol' SuSE 9.0 users manual Smile

The commands seem to be ALSA stuff (at first I thought Audacity was necessary).

FWIW. I am running Slackware 12, KDE and the sound was recorded from a radio stream running in Amarok

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Slackware 12.2
Slax

crouse · Site Admin Joined: 17 Apr 2025 Posts: 11833 Location: Iowa

Nice......... I did not know about arecord or aplay .......... will store that somewhere back in that murky grey matter I have ........ I think there is space left......... Very Happy

_________________
Veronica - Arch Linux 64-bit -- Kernel 2.6.33.4-1
Archie/Jughead - Arch Linux 32-bit -- Kernel 2.6.33.4-1
Betty/Reggie - Arch Linux (VBox) 32-bit -- Kernel 2.6.33.4-1
BumbleBee - OpenSolaris-SunOS 5.11

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