Hacker News Reader

Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com