Raspberry Pi Cookbook, 3rd Edition

Chapter 15. Sound

15.0 Introduction

In this chapter, you learn how to use sound with your Raspberry Pi. There are recipes both for playing sounds in various ways—using loudspeakers or a buzzer—and for using a microphone to record sounds.

15.1 Connecting a Loudspeaker

Problem

You want to play sounds from your Raspberry Pi.

Solution

Attach a powered speaker such as the one shown in Figure 15-1.

Having attached the speaker to the audiovisual socket, you will also need to configure the Raspberry Pi to play through the audiovisual jack, not HDMI, using Recipe 15.2.

Figure 15-1. Attaching a rechargeable amplified speaker to a Raspberry Pi

An alternative to using a general-purpose speaker like the one shown in Figure 15-1 is to use a speaker kit designed specifically for the Raspberry Pi, such as the MonkMakes Speaker Kit for Raspberry Pi, shown in Figure 15-2.

Figure 15-2. The MonkMakes amplified speaker and a Raspberry Pi

This speaker is connected using the audio lead supplied with the kit, and the speaker uses the Raspberry Pi’s 5V power supply, connected using the female-to-female leads.

Raspbian comes with a handy program to test that your speaker is working. Type the following command in the Terminal:

$ speaker-test -t wav -c 2 speaker-test 1.1.3 Playback device ...