I have a device that records .wav files at 8000 Hz with a sample size of 4 bits (I believe mono). Is there any plugin for xmms or any other piece of software I can use to playback these files?

xmms should be able to play them. check your audio i/o plugins to see if you have libwav.so

what version of xmms are you running? all i know is that for my version, wave player (libwav.so) is provided by installing xmms.

Standard wave files play on xmms. I'm playing a wave file from one of Windows sound themes (chimes.wav) which is PCM, 22050 Hz, 16 bits, stereo.

I know there's a lot of different .wav files, aside from the sampling rate and size. Apparently, this thing I'm playing isn't compatible.

okay. i understand. there are some of them windows wav files that i had to convert to mp3's and convert back to wav files because they just won't play.

you'll probably have to do the same thing. use lame if you have it installed.

lame -q 0 -b 128 some_win_file.wav some_win_file.mp3

lame --decode some_win_file.mp3 some_win_file1.wav

you should be able to play some_win_file1.wav now.

Thanks.

Actually, I had been aware of that just from using windows. Often, I'd have a wave file that just wouldn't work, so I had to open it with something like CoolEdit and then save it into a "normal" wav. But this wav file (which I had recorded from my Palm) would usually play under Winamp, which surprised me when it didn't play under xmms (with the two being so similar).

I probably would've done a wav->mp3->wav conversion if I were desparate. There has to be a better way. Nonetheless, thanks for showing me how to do it in the command prompt--that hadn't occurred to me and seems much faster.

I installed lame and used it for wav->mp3->wav. The resulting wave file was just static.

However, I managed to get kaffeine (but not xmms) to play the file. I did this by installing the lib2lame and w32codec-all packages. Not sure which one was the one that did the trick, but I'm guessing the latter. Now if only xmms would play it...