Christoph Eckert <ce@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > what's the advantage The container format allows you to put everything related to a project song inside the container. F.ex, for a song: You can store the whole session; each track and you can put every single sample and source code for synthesis in there. You can store a SVG or an image for the file and it will be the icon of the file for the song. You can also store images taken during the project of the song and also video if you want, of the recording or synthesis session. Maybe a commentary. You might want to throw the music video in there. You can have the text for the song in as well. You can set cue points, have menus, put the license in there, related documents and info. This is how free music and art should be distributed, in my opinion. Free music, the way I see it, should come with the source material and source code for whatever synthesis, notation and beat composition application was used. The data is very much compressed and lossless with flac. You can also compress it with paq if you want serious compression. You can put music on archive.org if bandwidth is a concern. A common misconception that I see, is that people consider shareable music as free. Free art, along the same lines as free software, should require the source material to be distributed along with the work, in my opinion. I think that music is also a functional work, because it gets me places. I don't mean to start a thread on what should be considered free music; we each differ in our view. In any case, matroska is a very nice container and you can pack it full of fun. On GNU/Hurd, you could have a translator for matroska, allowing you to browse the file like a directory. -- Esben Stien is b0ef@e s a http://www. s t n m irc://irc. b - i . e/%23contact [sip|iax]: e e jid:b0ef@ n n