I may be missing this in the forums because I am looking for the wrong thing. I want to be able to play an audio clip. The command would be similar to “say …” but with an existing audio file. The AS dictionary has exactly one hit for “audio” and none for sound.
I considered the command “open alias” but, unless someone can tell me the proper file type, this opens each sound in an application (iTunes, Quicktime, etc…)
Can anyone shed any light on this?
Sad to say it, but without the use of 3rd party tools there is no way with pure applescript to play an audio clip without launching an application to the user.
You can however do this though with AppleScript Studio.
Sadly, AS Studio has notoriously stumped me in the past. But thanks for ending my dilemma.
If you want to play a sound in the background, then you can use third-party software:
What are you trying to accomplish? AS Studio actually is really quite cool once you get the hang of it and we have an entire board dedicated to it here 
In a nutshell… I am writing a spelling test for my kids. Since it is spelling, I cannot “display dialog” the word and text to speech is not legible enough in most cases. So, I want to record me saying the words and then have them spell the word into the script to be checked.
Also, thanks Bruce. With AS Studio and your suggestions, it is nice to have contingency plans.
If you would like shoot me an email through here with some more detail. I wouldn’t mind setting up an example for you and email you the studio project for you to build off of.