One part of the NISO standard I read said that players should be able to allow the user to speed up the recording while restoring the pitch. In other words, the players should be able to deliver compressed speech much like what we presently have with the variable-speed Talking Book machines and tape players and the electronic pitch restoration devices which have existed for several decades. One question I have for the group is whether or not it is possible to even somewhat continuously vary the time base of the sound cards found in most computers? I know that most sound cards can be set to sample at 1 of a number of different rates, but the rates are still rather fixed at multiples of 8 kilohertz sampling and multiples of 11.025 kilohertz sampling rates. The 8-KHZ rate is good for communications-grade audio such as would be found on 2-way radio and telephone systems while the rates based on 11.025 KHZ samples can neatly fit in to the 44.1 KHZ compact disk standard. My question is whether or not it is possible to sample at rates that are deliberately non-standard in order to simulate the effect of a continuous speed control. This would also make it possible to rescue damaged tapes by recording them at a sampling rate that is off by enough to compensate for a recorder that is not quite recording at the correct speed. This may sound totally off-topic, but a digital Talking Book player has to be able to vary its sampling rate in order to emulate a speech compressor. There are actually two flavors of compression which have been used in the past. One is to speed up the tape or record and then run the audio through a pitch correction circuit so it doesn't sound like "The Chipmunks." The other compression scheme is one in which the tape is played at normal speed through a device that has a second recorder whose tape is stopped and started very quickly such that pauses longer than a set length are removed. Of course, the pause-removal system was less popular because somebody had to make the compressed recordings. The pitch corrector can be run right wen it is needed and run on the original recording. If sound cards can be made to slide from one sampling rate to another, then we should be able to have both kinds of compression on audio recordings. In reality, I know that a variable sampling rate is more than likely going to be a series of small steps, but if they are small enough, it gives the appearance of continuous variability. I have played in the past with the timer/counter device that controls the pitch of the P.C.'s speaker and that pitch is set by stuffing a 16-bit number in to a counter that divides a roughly 1 MHZ clock by whatever is in the counter. By the time one is in the audio range, it is very hard to tell the difference between one step and the next. I am hoping there is something similar in most sound cards that one can mess with to get odd sampling rates. I hope some of you experts can please fill in the vast holes in my knowledge base, here. Martin McCormick