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, for example, does not seem to exit when finished, forcing the harried user to hunt it down and click it closed every time. (wmplayer 11 also seems to strangely repeat some files if you pass it a list.) (The older (1990's) versions of 'mplayer' used to support a '/close' command line option, but it doesn't seem to work in wmplayer 11.)

I'd prefer to use something that everyone will have on their machine (like wmplayer, quicktime...)

Answer 1

• There are pure command line players. Some are listed here.

• Also, WinAmp used to have command line controller called CLAMP. I am not sure if it's still alive or available but Google for it - it was pretty good.

• Also, VLC has some command line capabilities though I never checked them out.

Answer 2

You can probably write a small VBScript which will use the Windows Media Player ActiveX control to play an audio file. You should be able to terminate the process from that too, once playing finished.

I'm looking around a bit and maybe can come up with a working solution. Might take a while, though.