thanks for the reply, the whole digital/audio/ide discrepancy has never been an issue before. i don't have a digital cable, i use audio for playback and ide (digital audio extraction) for ripping. that always seemed to work automatically, even on linux. but knowing alsa, they probably wanted to add another setting on their mixer ( i counted 37 on mandrake 10 for my audigy!!!). i think i mentioned earlier, i have sound disabled in control center (i'm not worried about system sounds at this point!). this is what i did, -enabled sound in kde control center - changed to oss - tried kscd - no joy -tried xmms - no joy -changed to digital audio extraction in xmms - cd audio works -disabled sound in kde control center - cd audio still works on xmms there seems to be no rhyme or reason to these problems. it was easier to set up an isa sound card with parameters with oss. my guess is there is a setting in alsa mixer for this. i found something called 'audigy cd' that sounded like it might fit and was unmuted but at zero. pushed it up to 80 and switched back to analog in xmms - l no sound. i am extremely frustrated with this issue and suse 9.1 in general. i'm also diappointed to hear there is no support for sound. they probably don't think it's necessary?! is this a novell thing? i didn't have any problems with sound on 8.1. is it the 2.6 kernel? is it alsa? ( i've had a lot of problems alsa elsewhere - namely fedora core2 x86_64). anyway, suse slapped this mess together so they are responsible! anyhow, i apprecaite the help i'm getting here. and since i laid down a good chunk of dough on suse pro (ha-ha) 9.1 i'm committed (forced) to finding solutions. hope there are some clues in my latest attempts. thanks