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Comment by 2h | Hacker News Reader

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I draw your attention to the fact that the other command I mentioned, see(1), will actually in turn call play(1) (at least on my system). You probably want your programs to call see(1) and not play(1) directly, as this gives the user more control over the commands run. This is why I said that calling play(1) explicitly and directly from a program is probably the wrong thing to do.

you seem to be oblivious to the fact that "play" can do more than play audio.

The sox(1) and rec(1) commands can do a lot more, yes. But we were talking about play(1), which exclusively does playback, with optional added effects. And for straight playback of audio data, your program probably should not call play(1) directly.

> optional added effects

Right. so why are you pretending that this feature doesn't exist, or is not consequential? playback alone is not the same thing as playback with effects.

> for straight playback of audio data

who said that is the use case here? the original link is just to the man page itself. YOU DECIDED, that the only use case is straight playback with nothing else. that might apply TO YOU, but others might be keen on utilizing the other features, hence why they were added in the first place.

Optional added effects are of minor consequence in a command mostly meant for audio playback (as evidenced by its name; “play”). I also did not completely deny the outlier use cases, which is why I wrote “very little reason” instead of “no reason”.

You are being unnecessarily combative.

> Optional added effects are of minor consequence

you seem to have an inability to use the phrase "to me". you dont dictate the patterns or usage of the population, only yourself.

The point he's making is that having something that just dumps an audio file to the sound output isn't usually what you want anymore. Now you expect to have audio controls and a UI, as compared to when I would cat smellsliketeenspirit.au > /dev/audio

> this is a pretty ignorant comment.

You're free to disagree, but don't do it this way.

This is a weird take. The command is obviously useful in the context it's useful in. To point out that it's less useful outside that context is not very meaningful.

It's like saying ls is the wrong command, because "what you want is a full file manager, with thumbnails and drag and drop and whatnot". Well, if that's what you want, you're obviously in a different context than the one you're in when you're reading the man page of ls, no?

Command line is a type of _UI_, sometimes better than other types of UX. And the audio controls are part of the command's arguments.

> just dumps an audio file to the sound output

did you even read the linked page? thats not all this can do by a long shot.

Dude, I'm pretty familiar with sox/play. I first used it 30 years ago.

99% of the time you really did just use it to play a file, but sure, it was nice to trim and equalize and concatenate things occasionally.

I use it to synthesize sounds in shell scripts.

sox has a lot of functionality besides playing an audio file.

Like synthesizers to generate audio, filters and so on.

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