Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@netbsd.org> said:

> As was mentioned, some codecs don't support variable rate, and only work with
> single fixed rate (typically 48KHz). If you do cat >/dev/audio, it tries to
> use the device with rate 8KHz, which would not work.
> 
> With similarily crippled auvia,
> 
> 	mpg123 -r 48000 file.mp3
> 
> did the trick :)

Thanks for that suggestion.  I tried it and it didn't work for me... :-(

| mpg123 -r 48000 '(Cake) Frank Sinatra.mpa' 
| High Performance MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 Audio Player for Layer 1, 2 and 3.
| Version 0.59r (1999/Jun/15). Written and copyrights by Michael Hipp.
| Uses code from various people. See 'README' for more!
| THIS SOFTWARE COMES WITH ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY! USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!
| Title  : Frank Sinatra                   Artist: Cake
|
| Album  : Fashion Nugget                  Year  : 1996
| Comment:                                 Genre : Unknown
|
| Playing MPEG stream from (Cake) Frank Sinatra.mpa ...
| MPEG 1.0 layer III, 112 kbit/s, 44100 Hz joint-stereo
| No supported rate found!

I also tried doing a "audioctl -w play.rate=48000" and then doing a cat
to /dev/sound but that gave the same error I was getting before (invalid
argument).

In fact, if I ktrace a cat to /dev/sound or /dev/audio it appears to be the
open() call that is returning that error and not a write() or ioctl().  Is that
what I should expect if the problem is as suggested - a codec that doesn't
support variable rates?

Unfortunately the machine I was testing was a demo and has gone back to the
vendor now so I can't try anything else.  Thanks for your suggestions though.

Duncan