I am trying to play an audio file but, for some reason it's not playing anything, it's firing end event instead of start event, right after the bot is connected to voice channel.

client.on('message', message => {
      if(message.content.startsWith('!play')) {

      if(!message.member.voiceChannel) return message.channel.send('connect to voice channel first');

      message.member.voiceChannel.join()
        .then(connection => { 

            console.log("Joined voice channel!");

            const dispatcher = connection.playFile(require("path").join(__dirname, './myfile.mp3'));

            dispatcher.on('start', () => { //not working
                dispatcher.setVolume(0.70);
                console.log("Playing");
            }); 

            dispatcher.on('error', (err) => console.log(err)); //no errors

            dispatcher.on('end', end => { //working fine
                console.log("Finished");
                console.log("End: " + end);
                message.member.voiceChannel.leave()
            });
        });

}});

I am trying to play an audio file but, for some reason it's not playing anything, it's firing end event instead of start event, right after the bot is connected to voice channel.

client.on('message', message => {
      if(message.content.startsWith('!play')) {

      if(!message.member.voiceChannel) return message.channel.send('connect to voice channel first');

      message.member.voiceChannel.join()
        .then(connection => { 

            console.log("Joined voice channel!");

            const dispatcher = connection.playFile(require("path").join(__dirname, './myfile.mp3'));

            dispatcher.on('start', () => { //not working
                dispatcher.setVolume(0.70);
                console.log("Playing");
            }); 

            dispatcher.on('error', (err) => console.log(err)); //no errors

            dispatcher.on('end', end => { //working fine
                console.log("Finished");
                console.log("End: " + end);
                message.member.voiceChannel.leave()
            });
        });

}});

• javascript
• node.js
• discord.js

3 Answers 3

As stated in the docs: https://discord.js/#/docs/main/stable/class/VoiceConnection?scrollTo=playFile the path to the file has to be an absolute path.

To solve this issue:

You can use the module path (no need to download) and the global __dirname to get the absolute path.

const dispatcher = connection.playFile(require("path").join(__dirname, './myfile.mp3'));

I removed ffmpeg-binaries from node-modules and installed ffmpeg using sudo apt and it's working fine now. The problem was that, i had both of these libraries installed.

Just wanted to mention that for me neoney's answer worked, but it threw an error on connection.playFile, what finally ended up working for me was:

const dispatcher = connection.play(require("path").join(__dirname, './myfile.mp3'));

Note that you can also use (__dirname, '../myFolderName/myfile.mp3') in the parenthesis to go out of the current folder and play from within another named folder up one directory.

For more detail on the plete setup, there is a decent video/channel here by CodeLyon: https://www.youtube./watch?v=q0lsD7U0JSI&t=917s