Subject: Re: playing .au files with xmms
To: Steven M. Bellovin <smb@cs.columbia.edu>
From: Ben Collver <collver@peak.org>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 01/29/2005 05:54:39
On Fri, Jan 28, 2005 at 09:57:36PM -0500, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> Has anyone managed to play .au files using xmms?
> 
> xmms per se does not seem to support .au format.  I've tried 
> xmms-audiofile (I even built most of a pkgsrc framework, so that if it 
> worked there would be a nice package for it), but it causes xmms to 
> segmentation fault (without, of course, a core dump; it's more 
> important to print a pretty message....).  I also tried the existing 
> xmms-meta-input plug-in with a script I wrote (following its examples); 
> it doesn't seem to do the right thing (i.e., I get horrible noises 
> instead).  Here's the operative line from the meta-input script:
> 
> 	sox -t au $2 -r 44100 -c 2 -t raw -
> 
> xmms also prints 
> 
> 	/dev/zero: application/x-not-regular-file
> 
> for reasons that are quite unclear to me...

I have never tried playing .au files until now.  Your meta-input script
works on my box.  Could you put the .au file you are trying to play
online, so I can test against that?  One thing to try would be sticking
-w and -s in the sox arguments.

The /dev/zero: application/x-not-regular-file is due to sloppy coding in
the magic_get() function, and it should have no affect on audio output.
I will silence it with a pkgsrc patch and send it back to the author.
If you put your xmms-audiofile work online, I would take a look at it
also.

Cheers,

Ben