Convert a .sfil to something Windows understands

[Oober_Noober]

I'm on a PIII with XP Pro.

Is there a utility to convert .sfil files into something that Windows can understand? I grabbed a bunch of neat sound files from someone's Mac and put them on my USB key. Of course XP has no idea what to do with them and my Google search didn't turn anything up. I think these sounds are from the good ol' System 7 days (insert nostalgic sigh here).

As a side note, I got the old files from an OS X machine but the files themselves were on an old Zip disk circa 1997ish. So X wouldn't even play them in the Finder like in olden days. I opened and exported the sounds with something called "Juicer" to both soundfiles and Quicktime files. When I transferred them to my Windows box the .sfils are all about 30 to 100k (normal), but the QT files are 1 to 2k (not normal). When I play them in the movie window I hear an awful staticky click and then ominous silence for a few seconds as the player's progress bar slides to the right. They worked fine on the Mac. Something must have gone wrong.

Thanks in advance.

--Oober Noober

[Rob Pomeroy]

I think you'll be struggling to find a Windows audio editor that can convert from this sound format.  You can download Belthazar from this URL - it's a Mac application that can convert between wav and sfil.  Possibly there are some Linux/Unix utilities that also understand this format.  I confess it's not one I've come across before, but then my Mac exposure is quite limited.

[Oober_Noober]

You can download Belthazar from this URL - it's a Mac application that can convert between wav and sfil.

This app is for the pre X environment and I unfortunately don’t have Classic installed on the machine.

Possibly there are some Linux/Unix utilities that also understand this format.

I've been wanting to learn more about my OpenSUSE partition... maybe tomorrow.  

I poked around at the Partners In Rhyme site and found a few sound utilities but none that could read .sfils. Digression:  there’s a neat program that allows OS X to play the original System 7 sounds on double-click without opening an external app. I didn’t try it myself, but it seems useful.

Let’s forget all about the .sfil problem. On the Mac, I converted the original system 7 sounds to Quicktime and iTunes formats. So now I’ve got them on my USB key. What’s funny is that when I plug it into the Mac the iTunes and QuickTime files are full size and playable. On my Windows machine the .mov files are only shown as being 1 – 2k while the former iTunes files are now shown as .sfil files and are their normal healthy size (just completely unrecognizable to any XP application). Ugh.

I think I’ll just convert the sound files on the Mac to a Windows recognizable format. Does anyone know of a share/freeware utility for OS X that can convert .mov files or iTunes files to .wav files (or any other format that Windows will recognize)? It would have to be for OS X and I’d prefer it to be shareware. I couldn’t find any such thing in my preliminary searches. I’m actually surprised at the seeming lack of good shareware sound editors and converters for OS X. Thanks for the effort. Back to my Googling…

--Noober

[Rob Pomeroy]

Sounds like there's some weird incompatibility in the way the Mac and the XP box read/write to the USB key.  Annoying.  Try writing multiple copies to different folders on the key?

Re .mov to audio - googling ".mov extract audio" will point you to LOTS of suitable software for that purpose.

Are .sfil files unencoded?  If so, you could load them manually into any audio editor (Audacity, for example) and just manually remove any header information.  Not too difficult, just a pain if we're talking about hundreds of clips.