I'll ask my friend when I talk more with him tomorrow, but as far as I heard the artifacts were always constant, seemed to be faster than the beat, and could sound like distorted hit-hat (but they did sound different on other tracks). He said most often if a few trackin in an album were distorted, most would be, but occasionally there were just one or 2 or none at all. At a guess, its a distortion thats triggered by certain features of the track signature ... Not sure what the bitrates were, but they're all ripped from CD using SonicStage 2.0, probably at default rate & format. Hope this helps! If not, will get clearer info on the answers tomorrow. Any ideas on whether we can revert to 2.0 by either running a normal uninstall, or uninstalling 2.3 altogether and somehow restoring whatever digital rights certificate are installed at the moment. I've no idea how this stuff works. Ideally I'd like to get the wav converter working with 2.3 and convert all of his tracks away from Atrac to mp3 so they're not DMA'd! Obviously, right now I guess the mp3's would have same artifacts. Cheers mate, Andy