 | The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline .(September 2022) |
aplay is a command-line audio file player for the ALSA sound card driver. It supports several file formats and multiple sound cards with multiple devices. For supported soundfile formats, the sampling rate, bit depth, and so forth can be automatically determined from the soundfile header.
aplay -c 1 -t raw -r 22050 -f mu_law foobar
Will play the raw file "foobar" as a 22050-Hz, mono, 8-bit, mu-law .au file.
: Sound recorder/player for ALSA – Linux User Commands Manual
 | This Linux-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
An audio file format is a file format for storing digital audio data on a computer system. The bit layout of the audio data is called the audio coding format and can be uncompressed, or compressed to reduce the file size, often using lossy compression. The data can be a raw bitstream in an audio coding format, but it is usually embedded in a container format or an audio data format with defined storage layer.
The Au file format is a simple audio file format introduced by Sun Microsystems. The format was common on NeXT systems and on early Web pages. Originally it was headerless, being simply 8-bit μ-law-encoded data at an 8000 Hz sample rate. Hardware from other vendors often used sample rates as high as 8192 Hz, often integer multiples of video clock signal frequencies. Newer files have a header that consists of six unsigned 32-bit words, an optional information chunk which is always of non-zero size, and then the data.
Shorten (SHN) is a file format used for compressing audio data. It is a form of data compression of files and is used to losslessly compress CD-quality audio files. Shorten is no longer developed and other lossless audio codecs such as FLAC, Monkey's Audio (APE), TTA, and WavPack (WV) have become more popular. However, Shorten is still in use by some people because there are legally traded concert recordings in circulation that are encoded as Shorten files. Shorten files use the .shn file extension.
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) is a software framework and part of the Linux kernel that provides an application programming interface (API) for sound card device drivers.
The Open Sound System (OSS) is an interface for making and capturing sound in Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It is based on standard Unix devices system calls. The term also sometimes refers to the software in a Unix kernel that provides the OSS interface; it can be thought of as a device driver for sound controller hardware. The goal of OSS is to allow the writing of sound-based applications that are agnostic of the underlying sound hardware.
Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves higher sound quality than MP3 encoders at the same bit rate.
XM, standing for "extended module", is an audio file type introduced by Triton's FastTracker 2. XM introduced multisampling-capable instruments with volume and panning envelopes, sample looping and basic pattern compression. It also expanded the available effect commands and channels, added 16-bit sample support, and offered an alternative frequency table for portamentos.
foobar2000 is a freeware audio player for Microsoft Windows, iOS and Android developed by Peter Pawłowski. It has a modular design, which provides user flexibility in configuration and customization. Standard "skin" elements can be individually augmented or replaced with different dials and buttons, as well as visualizers such as waveform, oscilloscope, spectrum, spectrogram (waterfall), peak and smoothed VU meters. foobar2000 offers third-party user interface modifications through a software development kit (SDK).
OpenMPT is an open-source audio module tracker for Windows. It was previously called ModPlug Tracker, and was first released by Olivier Lapicque in September 1997.
High Definition Compatible Digital (HDCD) is a proprietary audio encode-decode process that claims to provide increased dynamic range over that of standard Compact Disc Digital Audio, while retaining backward compatibility with existing compact disc players.
WavPack is a free and open-source lossless audio compression format and application implementing the format. It is unique in the way that it supports hybrid audio compression alongside normal compression which is similar to how FLAC works. It also supports compressing a wide variety of lossless formats, including various variants of PCM and also DSD as used in SACDs, together with its support for surround audio.
A cue sheet, or cue file, is a metadata file which describes how the tracks of a CD or DVD are laid out. Cue sheets are stored as plain text files and commonly have a .cue filename extension. CDRWIN first introduced cue sheets, which are now supported by many optical disc authoring applications and media players.
Audacious is a free and open-source audio player software with a focus on low resource use, high audio quality, and support for a wide range of audio formats. It is designed primarily for use on POSIX-compatible Unix-like operating systems, with limited support for Microsoft Windows. Audacious is the default audio player in Ubuntu Studio, and was the default music player in Lubuntu until October 2018, when it was replaced with VLC.
AMV is a proprietary video file format, produced for MP4 players, as well as S1 MP3 players with video playback. There are two different versions of this format: an older one for Actions chips, and a newer one for ALi’s M5661 chip, sometimes called ALIAVI.
This article describes audio APIs and components in Microsoft Windows which are now obsolete or deprecated.
The following comparison of audio players compares general and technical information for a number of software media player programs. For the purpose of this comparison, "audio players" are defined as any media player explicitly designed to play audio files, with limited or no support for video playback. Multi-media players designed for video playback, which can also play music, are included under comparison of video player software.
Quod Libet is a cross-platform free and open-source audio player, tag editor and library organizer. The main design philosophy is that the user knows how they want to organize their music best; the software is therefore built to be fully customizable and extensible using regular expressions and boolean logic. Quod Libet is based on GTK and written in Python, and uses the Mutagen tagging library. Ex Falso is the stand-alone tag-editing app based on the same code and libraries.
WildMIDI is a free open-source software synthesizer which converts MIDI note data into an audio signal using GUS sound patches without need for a GUS patch-compatible soundcard. WildMIDI, whose aim is to be as small as possible and easily portable, started in December 2001, can act as a virtual MIDI device, capable of receiving MIDI data from any program and transforming it into audio on-the-fly. It is the standard MIDI renderer for the GStreamer framework.
Yoshimi is an open-source software synthesizer for Linux. It contains three synthesis engines, using additive, subtractive and wavetable synthesis. Any single patch can use one or all. A kit mode allows a patch to have up to 16 of engine sets to support multi-layered sounds/drum kits. A complete setup or instance can contain anywhere from one to sixty-four patches.
DeaDBeeF is an audio player software available for Linux, Android and other Unix-like operating systems. DeaDBeeF is free and open-source software, except on Android.