BLOB help - yes I've read around!

Hi all

I'm a Java dev, new to postgres. I've just migrated an app during development from Derby to Postgres (due to better indexing features), but am very confused by the failing BLOB implementations.

PostgreSQL: 8.3.7
PostgreSQL-JDBC: 8.3-604
JDK: 6

A lot of what I've seen in searches and even in the google groups page, seems to be related to older jdbc drivers, where BLOBs were supported, both for OID and bytea. I'm currently getting 'unimplemented' exceptions doing anything with BLOBs.

My application saves sound files as byte arrays to the database.

Q1: Given that it's sound and not text, would it be safe to use bytea given that certain characters need to be escaped?
Q2: How on earth do I use the BLOB methods? In particular setBlob(int parameterIndex, InputStream inputStream) and/or createBlob() and setBlob(int parameterIndex, Blob x)?

Thanks a lot
Brad