Hi Kirk and all. I do have it running now with the mike; I scrapped all my settings and started over. I'm learning that sometimes you can think you are just changing one setting but it changes other things too. I do have mike now but am not sure how good it is; could understand myself on the speakfreely reflector echo server but thought it could be clearer or louder. Mic and boost don't seem to be doing much for me; maybe I have a crummy mike. but at least it's working. My only concer now is; will i end up going through this all over again when I record from a different source and then want to go back. I'm not sure if the script you sent will take care of that or not with the way beta12 seems to be set up. Last time on the reflector with somebody, I got an error message about soundbyte.c 9not sure if that's absolutely accurate; anyway, it aborted sfmike and left me stuck; I finally had to reboot. Don't know if this was because of my mie settings at the time, although I wasn't talking, or something else.