Drag and drop (requires System 7 and at least a 68020) finite memory infinite dimensional Ulaw (mu-law) sound file player. It recognises both Sun Ulaw files and MIME headerless Ulaw files. It also plays the data fork of any file which usually means listening to a load of crap.
UlawPlay uses a double buffering technique to read in chunks of data from the input file, apply the inverse mu-law characteristic and play it all in real time. In this way the application doesn't need much memory and can play very large sound files (no upper limit in principle). You may hear a very small amount of noise between chunks but it is not too bad; all this probably depends on the speed of the processor used and the disk access time.
Currently the program checks the mouse button to see if it is down to facilitate early termination of the sound (better than nothing).
You may need to rebuild your desktop to get the icon and the drag and drop facility going.
Hackers: The STR# resource ID 1000 called "Sound Chunk Size in Bytes" is the size of the blocks of data read into each of the two buffers (or, if you like, the buffer size). About 3700 bytes seems to work OK on a Powerbook 180 (default size). (I read somewhere the sound buffer size is 370 bytes and perhaps a multiple of this is advisable.) The application may need more memory if you pick a very large value (this is not advised by the way because the inverse ulaw translation takes time and there may be gaps between chunks of the sound). Ditto don't select small values for this buffer size because of the disk overheads and the program may crash). If your sounds are consistantly less than 10 seconds long you can choose the buffer to be this long (80K approximately) and you'll never have to worry about gaps. Remember to increase the application size if you go bezerk (there are two buffers remember).
The future:
At this point I'm willing to listen to suggestions for improvements. Obviously it would be nice to have it run in the background so you can use the mac for other things.
Use at your own risk. I'd like feedback even if it seems to work; also if you hear any audible artefacts.
Version History
1.0 Loaded the sound in memory so was limited by the application memory and it got upset if the Ulaw file was too big.
(Between versions, I generated UlawLongPlay which read in 16000 byte chunks and converted them to Format 1 sounds and played these in sequence (using SndPlay). This had a very limited release. It worked reasonably well but there were small gaps between the chunks. UlawPlay 1.1 below supercedes and outperforms UlawLongPlay.)
1.1 Double buffered sound playing. STR# resource added (Resedit hackable buffer size selection) and mouse button play termination feature added.
