Play an Audio CD in Terminal

mpv is a great tool to play all sorts of media in the terminal. Let's play an audio CD and groove to our latest mix.

Just works

Get mpv:

sudo apt install mpv

This may just work for you (hopefully). Insert your CD, and run:

mpv cdda://

If this works, great. Party on!

Btw, the cdda:// is kind of like a protocol. It's not a specific file. Instead, it's telling mpv where to look for a file to play.

Bonus: Play a specific track with mpv cdda://2 (for track 2).

If this doesn't play, there may be a little more to do. Read on.

Test Sound

Make sure that sound is coming out of your speakers:

speaker-test -t wave -c 2

If this works, you should hear a human voice announce speaker output.

Detect Audio CD

Another basic: Make sure that the audio CD is present. Run:

cdparanoia -Q

A CD present will yield a track listing:

cdparanoia III release 10.2 (September 11, 2008)

Table of contents (audio tracks only):
track        length               begin        copy pre ch
===========================================================
  1.   118403 [26:18.53]        0 [00:00.00]    no   no  2
  2.   130700 [29:02.50]   118403 [26:18.53]    no   no  2
TOTAL  249103 [55:21.28]    (audio only)

Troubleshoot Audio Output

For several iterations, I couldn't get my mpv command to work. I'd mostly get issues reported like this when using the mpv -v (for verbose) flag:

...
[ao/alsa] opening device 'default'
ALSA lib pulse.c:242:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: Connection refused

[ao/alsa] Playback open error: Connection refused
[ao] Failed to initialize audio driver 'alsa'
[cplayer] Could not open/initialize audio device -> no sound.
...

Ok, maybe I need to switch devices.

To see the audio output devices available, run:

aplay -l

And see something like:

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC256 Analog [ALC256 Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
...

This first device looked right. I added a few more output flags to the mpv command:

mpv cdda:// --cdrom-device=/dev/sr0 -v -ao=alsa --audio-device=alsa/hw:0,0

-ao specifies the audio output driver. You can see the options available using mpv --ao=help. Also is the lowest- (kernel-) level driver. I used it, but your mileage may vary.

Just specifying the output driver wasn't enough for me intially, though. I had to specify the device itself, hence the --audio-device flag. Now that this uses hw:0,0, hardward device 0, subdevice 0. I don't know why I had to be that painfully specific.

But after it worked once with all that jazz, the normie mode worked as well:

mpv cdda://