MacOS Command Line Audio File Player (afplay)

The command afplay in MacOS lets you play audio files in command line. Simply passing the file name to the command plays the entire audio file:

afplay song.mp3

You can check the available command line options to the command by looking at the man page (man afplay) or by entering the command only without any parameters (afplay). It is possible to change the volume, play duration, quality, etc.

Suppose you want to play an audio file with specified interval, say 10 seconds:

while true; do afplay song.mp3; sleep 10; done

Suppose you want to play an audio file at Random intervals:

while true; do afplay song.mp3; sleep $RANDOM; done

Here, $RANDOM is a uniform random number generator in the range 0 to  32767.