Q5.2.4: Sunsite sounds don’t play.

I’m having some trouble with sounds I’ve downloaded from sunsite. They play when I run them through showaudio or cat them directly to /dev/audio, but SXEmacs refuses to play them.

Markus Gutschke writes:

[Many of] These files have an (erroneous) 24byte header that tells about the format that they have been recorded in. If you cat them to /dev/audio, the header will be ignored and the default behavior for /dev/audio will be used. This happens to be 8kHz uLaw. It is probably possible to fix the header by piping through sox and passing explicit parameters for specifying the sampling format; you then need to perform a ’null’ conversion from SunAudio to SunAudio.