paplay command not found

Introduction

When you run more command in linux terminal / console, you get the following error message

paplay: command not found

or when using sudo you get the following error message

sudo: paplay: command not found

Solutions to paplay: command not found

How To Fix paplay: command not found in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux / Raspbian

In Ubuntu paplay is provided by pulseaudio-utils package.

pulseaudio-utils is:

PulseAudio, previously known as Polypaudio, is a sound server for POSIX and WIN32 systems. It is a drop in replacement for the ESD sound server with much better latency, mixing/re-sampling quality and overall architecture.

These tools provide command line access to various features of the PulseAudio sound server. Included tools are:

paplay - Playback a WAV file via a PulseAudio sink. pacat - Cat raw audio data to a PulseAudio sink. parec - Cat raw audio data from a PulseAudio source. pacmd - Connect to PulseAudio’s built-in command line control interface. pactl - Send a control command to a PulseAudio server. padsp - /dev/dsp wrapper to transparently support OSS applications. pax11publish - Store/retrieve PulseAudio default server/sink/source settings in the X11 root window.

To fix this problem, we can install more using the command below.

sudo apt-get -y install pulseaudio-utils

This command might take some time to finish depending on your machine internet connection.

You can also use apt command to install pulseaudio-utils.

sudo apt -y install pulseaudio-utils

Or if you have aptitude installed you can use the following command.

sudo aptitude install pulseaudio-utils

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to fix paplay command not found error in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux or Raspbian distribution.