Hello all of you, First of all, I would like to thank the entire community for hours of both interesting commentary, helpful advice, and a product that is unrivaled (my opinion) to any other media player out there! Secondly, I hope that I could basically trouble you all for a little bit of help in answering a question. Recently, I have been playing around with OSS programming in Linux. It has gone rather well. My current problem revolves around the format of audio know as: AFMT_S16_LE Which is a little endian and is defaulted to 16 bit samples. I have been using a signed short to pull them out of a file after recording for analyzation. This has worked quite well indeed. I have svga graphing software I have written to handle and scale the values, it makes a pretty picture, but unfortunatly... I am having trouble conceptionalizing what it is supposed to mean. From the OSS site, the proposed meaning of a sample is the volume of the signal when it is measured. The thing is... How does one have negative volume? The threshold I imagine is zero, or is it that I am simply looking at it wrong and that some other value is the threshold that I should be concerned with? Is there a way I can relate this value to frequancy? Any help anyone could offer in this direction would be most helpful... Jon Larabee