The initial problem was on a 32-bit Gentoo linux machine. I've now updated a newer machine running 64-bit Gentoo, and get the same problem. It can be worked around by manually chgrp'ing /dev/snd, or putting the command into a startup file in /etc/local.d/, but that's just a kludge. -- Walter Dnes <waltdnes at waltdnes.org>