Now I've dug myself in even deeper! I began by trying something that I thought would be simple and non-destructive. I inserted an audio CD into the CD-ROM drive and ran 'cdda2wav -D0,0,0 -e track1.wav`, thinking I would get a small file, as well as some audio from my speakers. Instead, I seem to have a never-ending process, which I can't seem to kill, even with kill -9! It's been running for about two hours now, and according to top, is competing with artsd for the lion's share of my cpu. THey're both eating up 40-45% each (strangely, always equal!). Is that -e option to blame? DOes cdda2wav not cooperate well with artsd, so they're both fighting over /dev/dsp? Any idea how I can kill that process without bringing down my whole system? Rick Green