excelent, this is exactly what I was thinking.. gzip was just a simple compression system, first thing that came to mind.. but i've looked around, and there are several proprietary formats for audio-optimized lossless compression.. an open standard would do the world a lot of good.. if i were a better coder, i would work on it. but i'm just a sysadmin :)

12gig green mk2 -- 080000125