Hi there!
My opinion is that if you go below 8-bit, 22kHz, it's just not worth
it. If you want to put your music out for public listening you'd probably
want people to hear what it really sounds like and not some compressed blur.
It depends what you're trying to accomplish. For simple voice samples
(without musical accompaniment), 8-bit ulaw is perfectly intelligible
(not great, but it does the job).
I hope to hear some thoughts about if anyone really is interested in
loading down sounds over www, and if so, how important is the sound quality.
Tips on useful datacompression for soundfiles would also be appreciated.
You might want to look into audio MPEG, which offers near-CD quality
reproduction from files which are comparable in size to .au samples.
The IUMA crowd uses this format heavily; you might look at their
"how-to" pages to see what players are available on your platform.
rst