Play files as if they were raw audio samples

Question

I once in the past used to play with files by playing them as if they were raw 8bit audio, but I forgot which program can be used to do this. How can I stream, say, /dev/random to my speakers with a single command?

Answer 1

You can pipe stuff into aplay (from the alsa-utils debian package).

Example:

journalctl -f | aplay

will play some noise on your speakers whenever any service writes to the journal.

cat /dev/random | aplay
--or--
aplay /dev/random

will play random noise.

From my other answer, give this a try ;)

echo "g(i,x,t,o){return((3&x&(i*((3&i>>16?\"BY}6YB6$\":\"Qj}6jQ6%\")[t%8]+51)>>o))<<4);};main(i,n,s){for(i=0;;i++)putchar(g(i,1,n=i>>14,12)+g(i,s=i>>17,n^i>>13,10)+g(i,s/3,n+((i>>11)%3),10)+g(i,s/5,8+n-((i>>10)%3),9));}"|gcc -xc -&&./a.out|aplay

Answer 2

I remembered, play is the utility. Use -t to manually override the format it is interpreted as. Usually actual file formats require a header present in the file, so use fXX or uXX or iXX "formats" for raw floating point, unsigned int, signed int sampled audio respectively. Usually play -t f32 FILENAME works well enough.

Go ahead, try some files, it'll be interesting. Most compressed files sound like noise (expected), but there's some interesting formats out there which I will let you discover on your own.