README.md

Playing audio on the Raspberry Pi

The simplest way of playing audio is to use the OMXPlayer application, which is described in more detail here.

To play an MP3 file, navigate to the location of the .mp3 file in the terminal using cd and then type the following command:

omxplayer example.mp3

This will play the audio file example.mp3 through either your monitor's built-in speakers or your headphones, connected via the headphone jack.

If you need an example file you can download one from here using the following command:

wget http://rpf.io/lamp3 -O example.mp3 --no-check-certificate

If you cannot hear anything, make sure your headphones or speakers are connected correctly. Note that omxplayer doesn't use ALSA and so ignores the audio configuration set by raspi-config or amixer.

If omxplayer's auto-detection of the correct audio output device fails, you can force output over HDMI with:

omxplayer -o hdmi example.mp3

Alternatively, you can force output over the headphone jack with:

omxplayer -o local example.mp3

You can even force output over both the headphone jack and HDMI with:

omxplayer -o both example.mp3

Running omxplayer as a background job

omxplayer will close immediately if run in the background without tty (user input), so to run successfully, you need to tell omxplayer not to require any user input using the --no-keys option.

omxplayer --no-keys example.mp3 &

Adding the & at the end of the command runs the job in the background. You can then check the status of this background job using the jobs command. By default, the job will complete when omxplayer finishes playing, but if necessary, you can stop it at any point using the kill command.

$ jobs
[1]-  Running             omxplayer --no-keys example.mp3 &
$ kill %1
$
[1]-  Terminated          omxplayer --no-keys example.mp3 &