Gibson Guitar's Audio Help Page

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.AU files are an audio compression standard implemented first on Sun Workstations. It compresses 8 or 16 bit audio data in either lossless or lossy modes. It compresses better than the .wav format that is more common on IBM compatible PCs. It is also more readily available on many more platforms and operating systems.

Macintosh

• There are several applications available for Macintosh. Note: System 7.x is required for Sound Machine 2.1.
  • Sound Machine 2.1.
  • Soundapp 1.51
  • ausnd (.au to System 7 sound files)

• There are a couple of small sound utilities that will play .au files available for Windows. Wplany is designed to be transparent (in other words it pops up no dialog boxes if you double click on a file associated with wplany in the file manager; it just plays it).

  Note: Up until recently Netscape for Windows would automatically play .au files. Unfortunately it seems that Netscape has broken this in their last version.

  To set up Netscape to use one of these programs, go to Options --> General Preferences... --> Helpers and then set audio/basic to launch one of the programs which will play .au files.

  • wham1.33
  • wplany

• Most workstations have utilities for sound playback that usually provide support for .au files. Packages are so varied that this document will not attempt to cover them all.

Copyright 1995 Gibson Guitar 1818 Elm Hill Pike, Nashville, Tennessee 37210 USA. All rights reserved.