Pretty straight forward quesiton, how do I compare the output of @encode? Instead of using "bits per sample" in the NSSound plug-in implementation I decided to use encoding since int and float both have the same number of bits. The only way I figured this would work would be to use @encode()... I went poking around in the Apple docs and can see it outputs a (const char *), but I noticed in NSPortCoder.m and NSArchiver.m compare using a switch(*type). So is the return value of @encode a string or int? I guess another question would also be if I should be using @encode to find the data type?