ResForge - access resource forks

I ran across this open source app today:

It is an app compatible with modern versions of macOS that can view and edit resource forks. I successfully used it today to extract AIFF audio data from an old sound file that had its data stored in a snd resource, and was therefore unusable by most modern Mac apps.

It is not signed, so Gatekeeper makes you jump through a hoop (right-click the app, then select Open, then give approval) the first time you launch it, but aside from that, it seems to get the job done. At least for the little I used it for today.

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I’m constantly amazed at how ‘the internet’ manages to keep old technologies alive. This is excellent, and will be a huge help when I get around to going through my old archive CD-ROMs. More immediately, I dug out my old “Sound Source Star Wars® Audio Clips™” a few months ago hoping to use the various clips (this was a classic Mac package that allowed you to assign sound clips to various system events like trashing a file).

None of my normal audio tools were able to convert or even open the sound files, which are sfil, a type of resource-fork only file that contains one or more snd resources. As with @Shamino, ResForge allowed me to export the clips as AIFF. In the immortal words of Darth Vader, and one of the clips I wanted, “I have you now”.

Thanks for posting about this @Shamino, it is an invaluable tool!

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For way more years than I’d like to admit, RedEdit was by far my favorite app… it just made using the OS a ton more fun.

It wasn’t a patch on Resorcerer. Fantastic app.

Back in the day, a friend and I turned the Finale 1.n enormously baroque dialog network (not merely a tree) into a mini adventure game. “You are in a maze of twisty little dialog boxes all similar. You can retreat, or advance at any tempo.” “You are standing on the edge of steep clef.”

I very much miss the time when macs were fun instead of merely ‘useful’ and didn’t constantly fight against my needs and whims.

@gingerbeardman, I just read your latest blog post about extracting sounds from Macromedia Director files. I know nothing about these file formats but noted that ProjectorRays left you with snd files. For future reference, in case you aren’t aware of it, ResForge might be useful for this kind of thing. It can play and export snd resources. Possibly wouldn’t have been part of your ultimate workflow, but it’s great for investigating classic Mac resource types to figure out what’s going on. [I realise this is slightly off topic, but the ‘comment’ option on your blog is Twitter which I’m not on!]

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Will check it out! Thanks.

I’m always poking around in old files and grateful of any tools that can assist.

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Just found this discussion, and was able to convert a number of SFIL files to AIFF. Thanks so much for mentioning that here!

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