I have been using mplayer to listen to Internet radio and generally been quite pleased. I did accidentally discover something today that really startled me. I was listening to the BBC World Service and decided to try something clever. I looked up the process number being used at the time for mplayer and set an at job to kill that process and then restart mplayer to play a different radio station. Well, I accidentally put in the wrong process number so the kill command, fortunately, sent the kill signal to a process that didn't exist. To my shock, the new process to listen to the other radio station ran and, to my utter amazement, I began listening to both audio feeds at the same time. Other than making an utter mess of the sound, both were perfectly proper. It just sounded like the sort of mistake you hear on radio or television when two sound sources are playing at the same time due to a switching error. I suspect that if one or the other signal had a different sampling rate, there would have been some sort of problem such as maybe one of the streams trying to play at the wrong speed or producing static, but I figured that the existing playback would either block the new job or cause it to end immediately with an error. The only bad thing I have encountered with mplayer is that the English documentation appears to be missing although all the directories are there, and certain Windows Media Audio files with graphics absolutely blow the player sky high, causing jobs to end prematurely or hang forever. Some of the public radio stations on line have a short message that plays as soon as one starts to listen. It tells you how to pledge money or who is sponsoring the feed and displays a logo and graphics on the screen. That seems to kill things and cause various problems. One such snag makes the player just hang forever until you finally kill it and put it out of its misery. Another similar link to a different NPR station plays a little of the announcement making one think it is going to work and then it ends, returning one to the shell prompt before playing the second link which is the live stream. On one of the two feeds, I edited the play list to remove the opening message and it then works perfectly on the live feed. I own a 600 MHZ Dell desktop at home and it is almost the twin brother of a similar computer at work and both choke on the same WMA files. I am not sure if I could set some parameters dealing with video drivers differently and clear up the problem, but since it is the same on both systems, I imagine it is related to video handling and possibly to the fact that I am using a serial terminal on both so that the video may not have anywhere to go. One last observation. While listening to the BBC World Service, I tried festival as in festival --tts testfile It spoke right over the audio. Again, kind of messy, but it didn't break anything. Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group _______________________________________________ Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list