MacOS users can get get "play" by installing SoX (Sound eXchange)

    brew install sox

Thanks, I should have realized searching for "play" in a package manager was going to be a poor user experience.

I think it must be installed by default in my distro.

Not in front of my Linux box right now, are these tools built in or part of stand repository?

It's part of SoX which may be in your repo depending on which distro you use.

These are just using the 'play' command, the aliases are just so I don't have to remember the arguments.

Play is a standard package from your package manager

Personally, I just use brew to install SoX on Ubuntu.

brew is a really nice package installer that works with both MacOS and Linux.

sox is in the default repository (for example jammy/universe). And it will be suggested as an install if you try to run play when it's not installed.

So brew, any "killer apps" on brew for linux? What's nice to get from there?

Linuxbrew is pretty convenient for installing dependencies, especially on "stable" distributions like Debian/Ubuntu. You can install specific versions of dependencies that you want, even keep them side-by-side.

It's also distro-agnostic, so it works almost everywhere.

Looks interesting. It both says that installing without sudo is a feature, which sounds neat, and that installing into ~/.linuxbrew is an unsupported feature.

  # On Linux, it installs to /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew if you have sudo access
  # and ~/.linuxbrew (which is unsupported) if run interactively.
  HOMEBREW_PREFIX_DEFAULT="/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew"
  HOMEBREW_CACHE="${HOME}/.cache/Homebrew"

Wow these are great, thank you