in case you haven't seen, www.slashdot.org has an article on the crackdown by fraunhofer. There's also comments and suggestions there about an opensource encoding technique. Quick question: in reference to the standard, only the *decoder* is specified by the standard. You can make any sort of encoder you like as long as it makes a valid bitstream. Let me quota from ISO 11172-3 "The encoder algorithm is not standardized, and may use various means for encoding such as estimation of the auditory masking threshold, quantization and scaling". I'm not a software lawyer or anything, but it might be something to think about. later mikecheng
