And I assume that jack purely deals with direct hardware buffers, right? Wouldn't it be perhaps also nice to have software buffers as sometimes machines can more easily deal with more periods of smaller buffers than less periods with larger buffers (please correct me if I am wrong). Finally, for those of you who may be experiencing problems while running modprobe.conf change that Paul suggested, it seems that hdsploader needs to allow a bit of time for the cardbus probing to take place before it can upload firmware, so you may want to create a shellscript (i.e. /usr/bin/autohdsploader). I found that 5 seconds of sleep do the trick. I am suggesting the shellscript since I haven't checked whether a sleep command in the modprobe.conf hangs the probing or is done in a separate thread. So the script would look something like this: #!/bin/bash sleep 5 /usr/bin/hdsploader (save, close, chmod +x) Alternately if sleep works ok in the modprobe.conf (I'll test that later today), you can do: install snd-hdsp /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install snd-hdsp && { sleep 5; /usr/bin/hdsploader; } Please note I also removed --first-time flag as then the hdsploader will be probed only when the card is inserted the first time but apparently my notebook does not know when the card has been removed, or perhaps the driver does not do anything to notify that change (dmesg is silent) so snd-hdsp is never rmmod-ed and therefore never properly setup using this script. While we're at this topic, does anyone else's notebook running on 2.6 kernel notify you when the cardbus has been removed? This may be yet another quirk of the ENE1410 Cardbus. Another quirk I found about is that hdspmixer's levels and/or peaks are not working properly -- they are slower and many of them do not work at all. Anyone else has this problem? (my guess is that it is again ENE1410 thingy). Best wishes, Ico --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.784 / Virus Database: 530 - Release Date: 10/27/2004