Gong stores audio as WAV so there is very little compression involved (this is good and bad). Incidently, this morning I was testing out the next release which will include podcasting functionality. One can enable a message board to be an accessible podcast with one click! Anyway, the Gong project has some rough estimates posted for your IT people ( http://gong.ust.hk/doc_faq.html): How much space do I need for the Gong server? The Gong server installation requires around 60Mb hard disk space. By estimating the amount of space used by voice messages we can give a rough idea on how much space a Gong server needs over a fixed period. Assume you are running a course for a year and there are 50 students in the course, and each student leaves a 5 minutes voice message in the system every week. Then the required disk space is: Disk space required for a 5 minutes message ~= 2Mb Number of messages per student in the course = 52 messages Total amount of space used = 2Mb * 52 messages * 50 students ~= 5G Using a similar estimation, if each student leaves a message on the board every day the amount of space required would be: Total amount of space used = 2Mb * 365 messages * 50 students ~= 36G Even if a student leaves message every day, which is extremely rare, the total size of disk space required is not huge compared to the typical size of hard disk nowadays. -- Tony Beld, Ph.D. Director, Language Technology Center University of Colorado at Colorado Springs [log in to unmask] http://www.uccs.edu/langtech Engineering 126 719-262-3691 *********************************************** LLTI is a service of IALLT, the International Association for Language Learning (http://iallt.org/), and The Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning (http://www.languageconsortium.org/). Join IALLT at http://iallt.org. Otmar Foelsche, LLTI-Editor ([log in to unmask]) ***********************************************