MacOS 7, 8 sound files

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Level 1

9 points

MacOS 7, 8 sound files

I have a bunch of old sound files that I collected back in the day. They're just silly files but I'd like to play them again. I got them when I worked at Apple in 1995 so I guess they were originally from MacOS 7, but I don't think they broke until MacOS X came along.

They were meant to have the old resource fork rather than extensions and nothing I've found opens them. I have no idea if the resource fork is still there but I've no reason to doubt the files are intact.

Nothing I've found can open them. I've tried appending a .snd and .mov to the files and they still won't play. Any ideas out there? I even tried a MacOS 8 emulator (MacOS.js) and that doesn't even work, let alone play files.

Posted on Feb 6, 2021 11:17 PM

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Answer 1

Jan Hedlund

Level 7

24,815 points

Feb 28, 2021 7:11 AM in response to Mike Rentner

Hi,

There were several shareware/freeware sound players and converters at the time.

http://umich.edu/~archive/mac/sound/soundutil/

http://www.nic.funet.fi/index/mac/info-mac/_Graphic_&_Sound_Tool/_Sound/

However, in order not to change or damage any existing sound files, you should really try to locate and use an older Mac. Preferably one working with something like System 7.x, but a computer running Mac OS 8.x or 9.x should be OK as well. It may even work with the Classic environment under early Mac OS X versions (up to Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger).

If an early, unprotected, file is transferred via a Mac OS X Mac or a PC, the resource fork will/may be lost. So, when transferring or downloading anything, always use/keep a BinHex (.hqx) or MacBinary (.bin) encoding for protection until on a "safe" Mac.

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