How to play MPEG files on a Sun
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When I click on an audio file it seems to transfer OK, but once the
transfer has completed nothing happens except I get a few strange
looking characters on the screen.
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this is the result of the WWW client not knowing what a .mp2 file is,
so it assumes that it is a text file. to try and get around this, we
changed things to go via ftp which should pop up a window to save it to
the local disk where you can run it through the appropriate software to
play. if you actually tried it today, please let us know exactly which
location and song you pulled down which failed to work correctly. the
sunsite http server has been modified to send a mime-type of
audio/x-mpeg for the .mp2 files so that clients can distinguish them
from video mpegs.

I have a Sun Sparcstation 10 running Solaris 2.2. What do I need to do
to be able to hear the songs in this archive?
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you should:

 1. grab a copy of maplay-1.2 from sunsite.unc.edu at
/pub/electronic-publications/IUMA/audio_utils/mpeg_players/Workstations/maplay.tar.Z

 2. grab a copy of v10.11 sox from ftp.cs.uni-sb.de at
    /pub/utils/sox-10.11.tar.Z

once you have those two programs (and you get them to compile ok), you
can play it on a sun system by doing:  maplay -s file.mp2 | sox -t .raw
-r 44100 -s -w -c 2 - -t .au -r 8000 - | sox -t .au -c 2 -w -s - -t .au
-c 1 -b -u - avg > file.au and then

cat file.au > /dev/audio

or use audiotool to play it. this is a bit kludgy, but it finally at
least *Works* on suns!