I think I've got my first problem fixed (about the devices). But now I find that xmms is perfectly happy with my sound files, but mpg123 is not. It just gives me all kinds of unpleasant messages like: mpg123: Can't rewind stream by 984 bits! [zillions of these, with various numbers substituted for 984] and big_values too large! and finally Blocktype == 0 and window-switching == 1 not allowed. Any clues about what's going wrong? thx, R