Netscape Packetized Audio (.la/.lma/ audio/nspaudio)

[Sgeo]

I was playing with Netscape, and noted that it supported, alongside better known audio file formats, something called "Netscape Packetized Audio", with extensions .la and .lma, and MIME types audio/nspaudio and audio/x-nspaudio

I had trouble finding any information about it, but eventually stumbled on ExifTool apparently having support for it in some manner, calling it a "RIFF format", and saying LA03 is a variant of LA.

I would like to see more information about this, if that is available. And whether any .la or .lma files even exist.

[StarGeek]

Looking through the source code a bit, it looks like the only thing exiftool knows about it is that it exists.  On line 2,019 of RIFF.pm it says

# minimal support for a few obscure lossless audio formats...

The next line is where it is checking for a block named LA02, LA03, or LA04, which are assigned as type LA back on line 51.

Exiftool will extract any standard RIFF type metadata it can find, but that's about as far as exiftool goes on the subject.

[Sgeo]

Someone linked me to http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/LA

I think this is what ExifTool is assuming. I was able to read the luckynight.la with exiftool. I was unable to play it in Netscape, and believe it's unrelated to Netscape Packetized Audio.

ExifTool does claim that the MIME type is "audio/x-nspaudio", which is also mentioned in the code.

I think that ExifTool got the MIME type from documents scattered on the web claiming that .la and .lma are that type, but the details are this Lossless Audio thing, which seems unrelated.

[StarGeek]

You might be right about mixing the two obscure filetypes.  But it would require an actual Netscape Packetized Audio file to compare with. And I was unable to find any such file, as was probably your experience. Practically no information at all except for the multitude of "File extension type" websites, which are all pretty much copy/pasted from each other.