Hi all,

I am trying to play a .WAV file which is in compressed format and I am not able to play it using xmms or any other player. I think to play it on linux , I need to first decompress it . The codec used for this format is DSP Group TrueSpeech(TM) and I don't know how to decompress it.Any help in this regards would be appreciable.

Thanks.

wav files are not compressed. You should not need a special codec to play it. xmms should have no trouble playing it. When these files are created like from a CD, there is no loss in resolution. It is exact. Although the standard came from Microsoft, it is well supported in Linux. There can be basterized structures in wav files, where the developer did something proprietary and there is nothing you can do to make it work except with the intended target program.

You can also do a search for the w32 codec package (it's around in rpm, tgz, and bzip formats). Install it and you'll be able to play a lot of things you weren't able to before. Just keep in mind, there are a few files you may never be able to play. It's rare, but it can happen.

A lot of the codecs are available for mplayer
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html
If mplayer cannot play it, you will have little option

Sound like the extension is wav but not the file

What does file filename.wav say

Thanks for ur reply. I downloaded some sample .wav files from net and I can play those files without any codecs. But, there is a medical transcription audio file which is just 512 KB and is its duration is 9 and a half min. .I have installed w32codecs also, but xmms is not taking this file. Morover I had performed many things on that .WAV file and I got one file named audiodump.wav ( Original file name is DICT0001.WAV) which when I play using xmms is same as DIC0001.WAV on Windows.And the size of audiodump.wav is 18MB. I just don't know how that file came there and I thougt the original one i.e. DICT0001.WAV is in compressed format (i.e encoded with truespeech codec) and I just don't know how to decode it.Any help in this regard would be appreciable.

Did you look at the mplayer website doc re codec?
What is the output of
file DICT0001.WAV

Wish I could help you more. I'm out of ideas on that one.

Medical transcription file? I used to work for one of the largest hospitals in the world and their IT infrastructure was pitiful. I was applying for another job with a hospital and they were even worse, again a huge facility. I finally decided that if I wanted to stay on the leading edge of technology I was going to have to avoid medical institutions altogether. They seem to be magnets for vender lock in, legacy technology, and workers who just want to collect a paycheck and not innovate. Hospitals happily sign up for contracts with venders which put the hospital facility at a supreme disadvantage in terms of control of their resources. It's really sad.

I ran into things like this all the time, not audio codec problems but other more important issues. I don't see it changing for hospitals either because many of the workers have been there a long time and are uninterested in change. I mean no disrespect to you, but when I see you trying to deal with a medical transcription file it brings back all sorts of old memories!

Hope someone else has an idea. I'm stumped.

By the way, here's one of the leading authorities on standards, NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). Here's their chart on digital media file types:

http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/isis/filetypes.html

NIST really cuts the crap when you need to look up an algorithm or standard. It's a great resource for academics and engineering professionals of all kinds, not just software engineers.

As I said before check mplayer
http://www4.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/DOC...status.html#ac
and it is listed there

background info
http://www.dspg.com/technology/trues...mpression.html
http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/comp.sp...ruespeech.html

I like NIST for other things, but they looked weak for the filetypes IMHO