As for the .wavs, after the ecommerce portion of the site was finished, it dawned on me that I shouldn't have been so fixated on mp3s and should've at least allowed for AACs and possibly uncompressed .wavs. That functionality is going to have to wait, however, because making the change isn't exactly cheap. A five minute, uncompressed, stereo audio file weighs in at about 55MB and the FLAC version is about 35MB, and you need special software (most are free) to decode them. I know some other services are offering uncompressed formats, but I wonder how well they sell given the large file sizes. This is really only a concern for people with dial-up and inadequate DSL connections, but if I'm not mistaken, the majority of people connect to the internet using the slower methods.
I think the FLAC option is a pretty good one. Though most peoples software won't read it it can be easily converted and as it's lossless it's as good as a wav.
It's a hard decision to make though (on the hosting end at least) but I can definitely hear when things are compressed, especially on a big system (even at 320k)
robin...
