Hiya, I was able to, as it turns out, solve the ALSA situation myself. The weird thing which I still don't understand is that my headphones were registered in Alsa as PCM, and there was an aditional headphone setting in the mixer which didn't seem to have any visible effect. I lowered the volume on PCM, and somehow the volume on the headphones lowered. Very weird behavior if I do say so myself. Now, the next problem I need to get out of the way is OSS emulation, as it seems that Eflite doesn't enjoy being used at the same time Speakup is controlling the card--I have Emacspeak, and like Flite for it when I can get it. Anyhow, I'm just deeply puzzled as to why that PCM trick worked, and thankful for Greg's suggestion, even though it didn't fix things. Thanks all, Zack. _________________________________________________________________ Climb to the top of the charts!? Play Star Shuffle:? the word scramble challenge with star power. http://club.live.com/star_shuffle.aspx?icid=starshuffle_wlmailtextlink_oct