The other day I stumbled across some items in my closet that probably belong in a computer museum: a 3.5-inch floppy drive (with a USB cable) and a collection of 3.5-inch floppy diskettes dating back to when I used a Mac Classic II in college. Among these old documents I found one diskette that was filled to its 1.4 MB capacity with sound files. The files did not have any extensions, and their icons in macOS Mojave 10.14.6 look like this:
Double-clicking the files did not play the sounds, so I tried to append common file extensions like .wav and .aiff to see if the macOS Finder or VLC would play the sounds, but that didn’t work. That is because those sound files were created in Apple System 7, and the actual sounds were stored in the resource fork where modern macOS applications no longer use this approach.
I found a handy donationware application called SystemSound which can convert System 7 sounds to AIFF or WAVE formats. It also includes an extension that allows you to play System 7 sound files natively in Mac OS X. SystemSound runs on Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later and is free. It worked like a charm, and here is what the user interface looks like:
I found a other approaches to extracting System 7 sounds that I did not test. One of them is an application called File Juicer, and other approaches are discussed in this thread. I hope this helps you make use of your System 7 sound files.
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