Some sound files have no extension

There are dozens of different file formats used for audio in “sound files”, some of which macOS supports natively and some that require add-on software. Some are familiar, and some are specific to some odd schene a few folks used back in the 1980s and hadn’t been migrated by the millennium. Your job here is to figure out what’s in these files. Some will recommend you try each of dozens of differenr fie extemsions, and that’ll (usually) work. But you’ll need to try a bunch of different file extensions, if this is the usual (weird) case. My preference is the command line and the file magic tool; the file command.

Launch Terminal.app, enter the string “file “ with the trailing space and without the quotes, then drag themfile,you want to,check into he terminal window. When you dragmthe file into the terminal window, macOS will replace it with the full path to the file; with the directory and filename for the file you want to, examine.

If what you see output from the file command is not clear to you, post that here and I or somebody else may be able to further assist.

https://www.archives.gov/files/applied-research/papers/unix-file-command.pdf

https://www.garykessler.net/library/file_sigs.html

https://ehttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_(command)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_(command). ... Includes command examples

Also possibly useful here is the UK National,Archive’s DROID Java tool. DROID is a more extensive version of the file magic tool.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/information-management/manage-information/preserving-digital-records/droid/

Choose Utilities from the Finder's Go meu, open the Script Editor, and run:

do shell script "file " & (quoted form of POSIX path of (choose file))

Look up the correct extension for that type of file and add it to the name.

(168293)

Just a suggestion, if you have VLC installed you can try opening them by right/control clicking the files and chose "Open With" VLC. If you don't have it installed, you might want to.

https://www.videolan.org/index.html

Can you post the output from the file command, and also the output from the following list (ls) command?

file ~/Desktop/myfile

ls -lnh@ ~/Desktop/myfile

The former command you’ve seen before, and the latter will display some details on the file size and a few settings, and the numeric and not-personally-identifying file ownership. (The font here is atrocious for this. That’s a lowercase L in that second command, twice. Or three times, counting the l in myfile.)

The old Mac OS 6 - 9 sound files had no extension, and the file utility in macOS reports them as empty. These files appear as the following on macOS as kind: document — because there is no installed software that can play them.

I just dragged one of these old sound files from archival storage and dropped it on my macOS High Sierra desktop to demonstrate this fact.

unzip the data and have a look. It’s quite possible this is an alias or a link, amd the aip command didn’t follow the link to the data. That’d require rummaging the contents of the resource fork to see what’s present there, using one of the cited tools.

How did you transfer them? If via a Fat32/MsDos formatted drive you need to zip them first.

The old Mac OS 6 - 9 sound files had no extension, and the file utility in macOS reports them as empty...

The file tool show them as empty, and (presumably) all data is in the resource fork? Yikes.

That /aip/ was intended to be /zip/—still not used to this new soft keyboard—and there’s no spell check available here in the forums quite yet.

I cited the resource fork tools earlier.

This is already deep in the “computer techie stuff”.

One other possibility I’ve seen around wirh data from older Mac OS versions... Some tools stored the data and the resource forks as separate files. Is it possible that you have the data, and this is he resource fork for the file, and the data is in a different (though usually similarly-named) file?