How to process .au files

[Dean Clamons]

Thanks to those of you who replied to my request. Here is what I  
found out and what I did about it (for now). It was pointed out to me  
that OmniWeb does not decide how to handle files based on their  
extension, but it passes the files on to the Workspace Manager. The  
Workspace Manager knows what to do with files based on what  
applications in the standard locations register to handle. That is,  
some application must have registered to handle .au files before they  
will be handled properly (otherwise they are passed to Edit). All of  
the processors for sound files that I have only register to handle  
.snd files. A number of people said they handle the problem by  
downloading the file, changing its extension to .snd, and double  
clicking them. David Norton made the interesting observation that  
perhaps they could be passed off to Opener. I looked into this and  
discovered that this was not too hard to do. In the Opener.app  
directory I added the line 

.au (mkdir $t; cp $f $t; sndplay $f)
to the Opener.table file. This causes Opener to make a temporary  
file, copy the file to it, and send it to sndplay which plays the  
file. We don't really need to make a copy of it, but Opener displays  
an error panel if it can't find the file. I also ran ProjectBuilder  
on the PB.proj file for Opener and added an icon for .au files to the  
Images suitcase, and added the au type to Controller.m in the  
openRequest method. Then I remade Opener and installed the new Opener  
in ~/Apps. Now, magically, .au files are played when downloaded by  
OmniWeb or when double clicked. The down side of this method is that  
Opener leaves open browsers hanging around for the directories it  
creates.
Thanks,
Dean