Play (1) Linux manual page

It isn't the same command, but here's a fun party trick.

echo "main(i){for(i=0;;i++)putchar(((i*i>>8&46&i>>8))^i&i>>13);}" | gcc -x c - && ./a.out | aplay

Some background spaceship engine noise with it:

    play -c2 -n synth whitenoise band -n 100 24 band -n 300 100 gain +20

here, title readers

> SoX - Sound eXchange, the Swiss Army knife of audio manipulation

> SoX reads and writes audio files in most popular formats and can optionally apply effects to them; it can combine multiple input sources, synthesise audio, and, on many systems, act as a general purpose audio player or a multi-track audio recorder. It also has limited ability to split the input in to multiple output files.

> Almost all SoX functionality is available using just the sox command, however, to simplify playing and recording audio, if SoX is invoked as play the output file is automatically set to be the default sound device and if invoked as rec the default sound device is used as an input source. Additionally, the soxi(1) command provides a convenient way to just query audio file header information.

linux.die.net man pages are horribly outdated.

Official docs: https://sox.sourceforge.net/sox.html

And?

There’s very little reason to call something like this directly nowadays. Usually, applications should use something like xdg-open(1) or see(1) (as an alias to run-mailcap(1)) to open and play arbitrary files. For internal playing of sounds, I would suggest some multimedia framework.