could the problem not be my sound card. But my Hitachi DVD rom drive?? i've noticed other problems with this drive in Linux.. when i used to use Xroast for burning CD's the program would not recognize the DVD rom as a read device. So i could not burn from my DVD rom directly to my Yamaha burner. and when i do a CDRECORD -SCANBUS there is no device ID for my DVD rom drive. is there another command i can do to find out the address for my DVD rom drive currently it is /dev/cdrom /dev/dvd or the media versions of these i can access it to get files off of a CD but i cannot use it to play music. or DVD's . thanks again for your help jw