I will weigh in a bit on this topic. Everybody else around me primarily uses Microsoft Windows and related products. This whole campus of roughly twenty-thousand students and another three-thousand give or take a few hundred staff members uses and sometimes barely uses Windows and products that run on Windows. We have a few Mac users and those of us who are FreeBSD and Linux users, but I feel great if I can just hand somebody a file and say, "Here. This is what you needed." Information is what this game is all about and my hope is that Linux will make it easier for computer users who are blind to function along side everyone else. I send and receive ASCII files all the time and people use them, but just as we would rather get sound files we can play and text files we can read without doubling the cost of our work stations or going to a lot of various other forms of hassle, the general user community wants stuff they can use without a lot of trouble. Utilities that convert one format in to another should be our stock and trade since smart employers and instructors will not get nearly as hung up about whether or not we can do this or that job if we can simply make our system work with the existing infrastructure. I am not ranting at anybody or saying that anybody is wrong, only that I like it if I can take something I am comfortable using, feed it in to a filter or format converter and come out with some gibberish in standard output or sent to some file that the other guy is happy with. I don't know how many care, but this happens all the time when you make an international telephone call. The digital ISDN lines in Europe and many other countries use something called A-law encoding for audio. It is a piece-wise handling of the logarithmic values which represent sound levels. In North America, our ISDN lines have a piece-wise logarithmic function which is slightly different. It is called MU-Law encoding. Audio encoded with one scheme sounds positively terrible if received on a telephone built for the other system so there are digital converters that substitute MU-Law for A-Law encoding as the audio flies back and forth across the pond. I believe that our /dev/audio device is set up to receive MU-Law signals, here, and you can set your /dev/audio in Europe for A-Law, but I may be dead wrong. My point is that it is a neighborly thing to do if you can communicate with the rest of the world in a manner that works for all. We Linux users probably have more flexibility built in to the operating system than non-UNIX users so building converters should be a lot less painful for us. I am sorry if this sounds like a rant, but it is a positive rant if such a thing exists. Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK OSU Center for Computing and Information Services Network Operations Group