Playing audio

The latest Raspbian image comes with all the sound drivers and utilities installed. The packages that are used belong to ALSA. The Pi has no way to record audio, as it has no microphone jack and the GPIO pins are all digital. To record audio using GPIO, we need to use an A/D (Analogue-to-Digital) device or a USB sound device that has a microphone input.

Using aplay

The following is a pre-installed package that plays WAV files:

# cd /tmp
# wget http://goo.gl/Ps3paV
# mv Ps3paV siren.wav
# aplay siren.wav

Using OMXPlayer

We can play back mp3 files using OMXPlayer.

# omxplayer audio-test.mp3

Using AirPlayer

There is a project called shairport which works really well on the Pi. It does not support videos or photos, but streaming music is very stable. We will need to get the project and compile it. This will only take a few minutes.

# cd /tmp
# git clone -b 1.0-dev git://github.com/abrasive/shairport.git
# cd shairport
# sudo ./configure && sudo make && sudo make install...