Hi there Carlo, thanks for your suggestions. I have thought about this, and i have been annoyed in the past to find that the cd i waited for 6 weeks to arrive contains a bit of "mp3 squish". that was a while ago, however, and i have this to say about mp3: when people use 128 you can tell. end of story. most mp3 servers will not accept 128 based mp3s anymore - and mine certainly won't. if you use a recently updated encoder and set it to output at a minimim of 192 it is extremely difficult to hear the difference - and let's face it - most of these live recordings are a bit crackly and mangled by tape duplication after tape duplication anyway. i can honestly say that i know my copy of the august 1980 "bring on the night" police show was sourced from mp3 (encoded at variable bit rate - very high quality) and i just can't tell. it sounds that good. basically, i hear what you are saying - i intend to set rules to ensure all members encode their material at a minimum of 192 or maybe even 256 / vbr if it is an exceptional live recording, and i won't accept less than 192 in any situation. don't forget there will be a section of the backup server for scans of pics and magazine articles that people just can't get hold of as well, and these ceratinly won't be able to invade the "trade market" as they will be isolated files from the original magazines they came from! basically your concerns are based on the supposition that people are going to make audio cds from these mp3 based files and then try and trade them physically and that is not what my project is about at all. i may be annoyed at times by how hard it is to satisfy traders, but at the end of the day i respect how long they have spent finding elusive releases. and they willl always have those beautiful 45's and 33s.... i just want to start making some actual _music_ available.... i have thought about bit-torrent but i have no idea how to set that kind of thing up - and anyway, i actually would rather use high quality mp3 files than shn or flac files. 99% of the music i find through BT is in mp3 form anyway. cheers and stay tuned....