Commands tagged sound

I wasted two hours reading the sox documentation and searching on the web for the format of some obscure fscking sound sample, and then finally came up with this. This plays only the first three seconds of your unknown formatted sound file using every one of sox's built-in filetypes. If you don't get an exact match, you may get close.

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I could not fit every single type in and keep it under 127 characters, so you will have to replace "..." with the full list obtainable by `$ sox --help` (or try `Show sample output`)

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note: /usr/bin/play should be linked to sox on most systems.

Substitute 'brown' with 'pink' or 'white' according to your taste.

I put this on my headphones when I'm working in an "open concept" office, where there are always three to five conversations going in earshot, or if I'm working somewhere it is "rude" of me to tell a person to turn off their cubicle radio.

Sends random sounds to your sound card output (e.g. your speaker). Think... You can also run it remotely on another computer using SSH and scare its user!

for when a program is hogging the sound output. finds, and kills. add -9 to the end for wedged processes. add in 'grep ^program' after lsof to filter.

When trying to play a sound you may sometimes get an error saying that your sound card is already used, but not by what process. This will list all processes playing sound, useful to kill processes that you no longer need but that keep using your sound card.

use '0' and '9' to increase/decrease volume. this is useful on laptops with low speaker volume.

Useful tool to test if all speaker channels are working properly. speaker-test is part of alsa-utils package

Volume up und unmute (ignored if Master is not muted).

Replace "+" by "-" for volume down and unmute if necessary.

Generates a frequency sweep from $x to $y, with $d numbers inbetween each step, and with each tone lasting $l milliseconds.

Ever since the switch to pulseaudio, Ubuntu users including myself have found themselves with no sound intermittently. To fix this, just use this command and restarts firefox or mplayer or whatever.