To facilitate multi-laboratory exploitation of speech database material, SAM has defined a standard, transparent specification of all files used in the acquisition of post-processing of speech recordings for assessment and research purposes. In addition, a standard SAM recording software package, EUROPEC, developed at ICP - Grenoble, uses a set of SAM standard speaker and prompt file structures and produces speech and orthographic label files of standard format. This section gives details of formats and functions of files, and defines their function in the different stages of acquisition and processing.