
YOU CAN PLAY SUN-STYLE AUDIO FILES ON YOUR PC'S SPEAKER UNDER LINUX!!

"auplay" is a rough attempt at an "*.au" audio file player for Linux
which uses the PC's internal speaker.  It does not (and can not) use a
sound board, even if you have one.  It doesn't cooperate well with any
other applications either, since it depends heavily upon timing-loops.
(It doesn't even get along nicely with its own disk-reads. :-(  )

It might be nice to work this into the kernel as the default /dev/audio,
since everyone has an internal speaker, but in its present form (with
its delay-loops) it would be a horrible cycle-hog.

As it is, two or more "auplay" processes can collide, chopping their
outputs into intermixed bits and pieces on the speaker... which isn't nice.

I've included a couple audio files from Sun's PD demo package for testing.
Note that the *best* way to play a file is to re-direct auplay's input and
not to have anything else running...  Even cat'ing files to auplay seems
to cause some stuttering, since there are two processes at work.  Trying
to uncompress-pipe-play compressed audio files is even worse.  Oh well.

YOU WILL PROBABLY NEED TO ADJUST THE "DELAY" CONSTANT IN THE Makefile TO
MAKE auplay WORK ON *YOUR* PC...

Compilation and installation should be smoothly handled by the Makefile.
You must be "root" to install "auplay" (and the "play" script) which go
into /usr/local/bin by default.  If not yet installed, you must be "root"
to test auplay.  You may find the "play" script handy, you may not.

As a side-note, I highly recommend "shorten", an audio compression utility
available in source-code via anonymous ftp from svr-ftp.eng.cam.ac.uk as
/misc/shorten-1.03.shar.  It gets better compression on *.au files than
GNU zip does, but don't expect too much.  Audio files are notoriously
difficult to compress.  :-(

	Rick Miller - Linux Device Registrar <rick@ee.uwm.edu>

P.S.:  I CAN'T BELIEVE HOW MUCH *FUN* I HAD DOING THIS!!!  :-)  :-)

