Has anyone managed to play .au files using xmms?

xmms per se does not seem to support .au format.  I've tried 
xmms-audiofile (I even built most of a pkgsrc framework, so that if it 
worked there would be a nice package for it), but it causes xmms to 
segmentation fault (without, of course, a core dump; it's more 
important to print a pretty message....).  I also tried the existing 
xmms-meta-input plug-in with a script I wrote (following its examples); 
it doesn't seem to do the right thing (i.e., I get horrible noises 
instead).  Here's the operative line from the meta-input script:

	sox -t au $2 -r 44100 -c 2 -t raw -

xmms also prints 

	/dev/zero: application/x-not-regular-file

for reasons that are quite unclear to me...

		--Prof. Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb