I have been browsing for more than 7 hours now, and I am still hesitating and can't find any answers. As of now my prefered language is python but I am starting a project in which I would like to have multi-thread sound manipulation on multiple platforms and apparantly ruby can fulfill this. Can ruby record/play sounds on multiple platforms? Ruby has a network library but not much is said on the sites I've seen where can I get more info on streaming? UDP and TCP? also I would like to have a GUI front end what is the standard GUI? (again must be multi-platform) Can I compile Ruby code for easy distribution?(in python there is an app called freeze which will embed the python interpreter to the code in one executable) or a sort of VM like for squeak. how fast is Ruby? best regards Stephane