Let's develop an open-source media archive standard

No! Please! Not for archival purposes! 44.1KHz is good enough for casual listening, for most people, but it is not good enough for archival - and for a serious audiophile, it's not enough even for listening. If I had analog audio to digitize for archival purposes, I'd aim for 1MHz sample rate and at least 24bit (preferably 32bit) A->D. It seems like overkill by today's standards, but storing a couple of orders of magnitude more data is cheap compared to discovering you need - or even just want - data that simply isn't there now that the original's gone. Of course, this is a choice to be made by the person converting the analog data to digital. I think the format spec should be able to describe whatever that person chooses; I think it would be a _very_ bad idea to assume anything about what that choice will be. The format should be able to handle anything from 3 bits/sample compressed sound such as I get from my voice modem, or even less, to multi-MHz sample rates at hundreds of bits per sample (8-eg, channel 32bpp = 256 bits per sampling tick). For audio, you probably could get away with capping it at a few GHz sample rate - I'm not sure air can carry frequences that high - but I see no reason to impose any limit. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B