Walter,
I can understand your concerns about the time involved to mess with the windows media SDK, but you'd be surpised how simple it really is to figure out. If you have VFP7 or VFP8 it's a breeze....the trick is to create the encoder object...then from the command window you can use the intellesense feature to figure it out....
There are some samples here I think...
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/code/list/winmedia.asp
When I first looked at it, it took me about 1/2 a day and I had it mastered. I wish I could send you some of the code I did with it but unfornuatly it belongs to the client I wrote it for.

>I'm looking for a for a solution to store audio files within a VFP and SQL database.
>
>
>Some preferences:
>- Not a VB solution, I don't want to ship VB OCX files which depends on VB runtime files.
>- Easy to integrate
>- It must be possible to select a compression codec.
>
>I know this should be possible with the Windows Media SDK, but it would take too much time to figure out how to do this unless you've got an example.
>
>Any help would be greatly appriciated.
>
>Walter,