QuickTime for Java: A Developer's Notebook

Playing an Audio File from the Command Line

To finish this chapter, we’ll look at a very simple example of QTJ code that actually plays some media. To keep things simple, I’ll completely ignore the GUI, so all this will do is take a file path from the command line—presumably an MP3 or other audio file—and play it in QTJ.

How do I do that?

Compile and run the source for TrivialAudioPlayer.java, shown in Example 1-5.

Example 1-5. Playing an audio file from the command line

package com.oreilly.qtjnotebook.ch01;
  
import quicktime.*;
import quicktime.app.time.*;
import quicktime.io.*;
import quicktime.std.*;
import quicktime.std.movies.*;
 
import java.io.*;
  
public class TrivialAudioPlayer {
 
  public static void main (String[  ] args) {
      if (args.length != 1) {
          System.out.println (
              "Usage: TrivialAudioPlayer <file>");
          return;
      }
      try {
          QTSessionCheck.check( );
          QTFile f = new QTFile (new File(args[0]));
          OpenMovieFile omf = OpenMovieFile.asRead(f);
          Movie movie = Movie.fromFile (omf);
          TaskAllMovies.addMovieAndStart( );
          movie.start( );
      } catch (QTException e) {
          e.printStackTrace( );
      }
  }
}

Once compiled, run it with the path to an audio file as a command-line argument. Note that if you downloaded the book examples and compiled with the ant buildfile, the classes will be in the classes directory, so you’ll need to extend your classpath into there:

cadamson% java -classpath classes
  com.oreilly.qtjnotebook.ch01.TrivialAudioPlayer
  ~/mp3testing/Breakaway.mp3

What just happened?

This application provides a bare-bones ...