Well, I have certainly learned some interesting things today. Results. Studio recorder on a 1 hour file with white noise and various other high quality sounds. No VBR high quality, and in simple stereo and not joint stereo. Converted all files at 192 KBPS. Time taken. 3 minutes 40 seconds. Sound Forge with the same file, and the same settings except that I had stereo set to joint. Are you ready for this? 20 minutes and 23 seconds. I then discovered the error of my ways and set Sound Forge to simple stereo. It still took 20 minutes and 23 seconds. The SF and SR files were within 3 KB of being the same size and I could tell no difference in quality between them. I then read Rob's message about very high quality MP3 conversion. It was way down at the bottom of the list and I didn't see it the first time. So, I cheated. I used the same file in SR but only 10 minutes of it and multiplied it by 6 to get 60 minutes. When I got to 7 minutes on the 10 minute file, times 6 or 42 minutes, I canceled the operation. Rob, I think you're right. If there is no significant difference, I would remove it. The question is, is there a difference. Even if there is, it ain't worth that long a time to convert in my opinion. One question though. Here is the definition of Joint stereo that Sound Forge uses. Rob, tell me if this is your understanding of this and if it is needed on a file that is converted at 192 KBPS. Sound forge does some other additional processing as you will see in their description. if Joint stereo Select this radio button if you want the encoder to be able to take advantage of the similarity between the two channels of a stereo file. Joint stereo encoding is useful when you want to create a stereo file but require a relatively low bit rate. When the radio button is selected, select or clear the Intensity stereo or MS (mid/side) stereo check boxes to indicate which encoding methods will be used. Intensity stereo In this mode, the encoder can take advantage of the fact that the human ear does not distinguish location information for low frequencies as well as it does for higher frequencies. For high frequencies, magnitude and spatial information is encoded. For low frequencies, only magnitude and phase are encoded. These check boxes are not available in SF in normal stereo mode. So, there you have it friends. Neal Ewers Ravenswood Productions Local phone: 608-277-1995 Toll Free: 888-544-8332 Email: <mailto:Neal.ewers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Neal.ewers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx <http://www.ravenswood.org/> http://www.ravenswood.org