Playing .WAV : Does OS-X insist on Itunes ?

When I get voice mails, I get an email copy that includes a .WAV
attachement with the actual messages.

Thunderbird asks "do you want me to open this using Quicktime" (the app
I selected for .WAV), I click OK and after some huffing and puffing, I
find the voice mail playing in itunes. (polluting my library with
voicemails).

How can I prevent that ? Why does this happen ?

Is this Quicktime telling istelf "I better hand this over to Itunes" ?
Or is it the operating system that intercepts the call and calls itunes
instead of quicktime ?

The quicktime application is not started.

 

Sounds more like Thunderbird screwing up, because (a) Mac OS X does not
insist on using any application for any file type, and (b) QuickTime
Player can most certainly handle WAV files. I have no idea how
Thunderbird handles things but I'd check out its preferences in case
it's trying to open Quicktime Player directly and somehow has its
settings messed up. I'd also suggest setting QuickTime Player as the
default app for WAV files.

 

I would pick any .wav file on your system, and under "Get Info" change
the "Open with" to QuickTime Player.app for all those .wav files. Mine
open in QT Player. Remember, "QuickTime" doesn't necessarily mean the
just the player, particularly not to Thunderbird.

If you can highlight the attachment in your mail, you may be able to
get QuickLook to open it just by hitting the space bar.

 

I suggest VLC. It is a cross platform open source (free) media player.
It literally plays everything - including Microsoft proprietary files.

Once you install VLC do what Warren said - right click and hit get info
to associate that file with whatever app you want.

Also, if you need to convert a file there's Handbrake - another cross
platform open source free video tool.

 

I think I'll try that and see how it compares to VLC.

 

I keep VLC and a bunch of stuff around, but I always wind up using the
QT Player (Pro) for just about everything. Once you've installed Perian
and so on, it plays everything nicely, even recognizes the chapters in
..mkv files.

I like VLC, but as someone else has pointed out, it's a bit "crashy" dnd
it has hidden prefs files that can cause some grief. I've never
successfully used it for transcoding anything.

 

I found Perian to be crashy, actually. The only times VLC shit on me
was when playing Microsoft files. However when i get one of them, I
always convert to mp4 via Handbrake - VLC doesn't transcode as far as I
know. If it does, it probably sucks.
God forbid Microsoft and its piece of shit Expression Encoder support
mp4 by default. People encode their files and send them to me without
knowing what its encoded. But hey, at least Expression Encoder now
supports H.264 in its latest service pack. The quality probably sucks
though.

 

The trouble with QT Player for me is it often fails to play video where
VLC works, or will force use of some subtitles unlike VLC which always
gives me control, and rarely crashes IME. YMMV, but QT Player + Perian
performs sub-optimally for me, but maybe it's just my liking for
BitTorrent to access video I can't get here for a reasonable price, or
at all - as uploaders use a wide variety of encoders and file formats.

 

Hell, even preview or Quicklook in the Finder plays those.

 

I disagree.
If the OP wants to explore other options he will see our opinions on
Perian and VLC.

and VLC just released another version which is a hell of alot more
stable, even with Microsoft videos.

 

Indeed.
Isn't uncompressed WAV basically a generic standard for all platforms?
From wikipedia...
"Both WAVs and AIFFs are compatible with Windows, Macintosh, and Linux
operating systems. The format takes into account some differences of the
Intel CPU such as little-endian byte order. The RIFF format acts as a
"wrapper" for various audio compression codecs."