[clug] Strange audio format

[Mike Carden]

I have just encountered a very strange audio format. It's on a Sony
music player that I connected to a desktop Linux machine for the
purpose of using Amarok to play music resident on the player. Amarok
didn't want to know about it. It turns out that the audio is stored as
OMA files which the Internet informs me are Sony ATRAC3 files.

Not even VLC seems to want to play them.

Some web searching turns up the assertion that mplayer will play them,
but my copy doesn't and the mplayer web site doesn't have any obvious
reference to playing them.

Has anyone else played these on Linux or does anyone have a suggestion
for playing or transcoding them?

Thanks,
MC