How to play audio file on windows from command line?

Question

In Windows, is there a simple way (i.e. something you could type on a single command line) to just play a couple of .mp3 files and then exit on its own?

wmplayer, f

Answer 1

This is what I did to do it:

rem Replace the following path with your music file
start C:\Users\Username\Desktop\your-music.mp3
rem Replace 10 with how many seconds you want the player to run
ping localhost -n 10 >nul
taskkill /im wmplayer.exe

Note this requires .mp3 to be associated with wmplayer.exe (Windows Media Player).

Answer 2

I've found that the fastest way to play .mp3 files in Windows commandline is mpeg123

I know it's not available on people's machine per default, but from my point of view, Microsoft's own players are not consistently available over different versions either.

I'm using it on a project where the execution time is essential, and features like only playing certain frames makes is very useful. I find this (in my configuration) faster than the cmdmp3 and vbscript examples mentioned in this thread.

My syntax to only play certain frames of an .mp3 file : mpg123.exe -k 2 -n 3 -q -1 -4 beep.mp3

Answer 3

Old question, new answer - you could use PowerShell:

powershell -c (New-Object Media.SoundPlayer 'c:\PathTo\YourSound.wav').PlaySync();

Answer 4

I have used cmdmp3. Very lightweight at 28Kb.

Answer 5

Use VBScript:

Set objArgs = Wscript.Arguments

if (objArgs.Count = 0) then
    Wscript.echo "I need a sound file as argument!"
    WScript.Quit 123
end if
Wscript.echo "Playing: " & objArgs(0) & "..."

Set objPlayer = createobject("Wmplayer.OCX.7")

With objPlayer  ' saves typing
    .settings.autoStart = True
    .settings.volume = 50  ' 0 - 100
    .settings.balance = 0  ' -100 to 100
    .settings.enableErrorDialogs = False
    .enableContextMenu = False
    .URL = objArgs(0)
    WScript.Sleep(10000)  ' time to load and start playing
    '.Controls.Pause()  ' stop
End With

MsgBox "if WMP is still playing, clicking OK will end it", _
    vbInformation, "WMP Demo finished"

If the VBScript process ends, the Media Player ends too, you have to wait for it (I don't need it, my sounds are only some seconds long).

I used this for my special case today: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/microsoft.public.scripting.vbscript/gfOOvnN8t-U

Answer 6

If you need something cross-platform, mplayer works well on linux and windows and is compatible with npm's play-sound.