Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlyle | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com