[LAU] Jack max ports question

Hi list, today I got some time to play around with RME's Madiface (and its ExpressCard) under Linux/Jack. The card uses Thomas' old hdspmixer with correct display and routing abilities, it's simply awesome to have 64Ins and 64outs on a Linux laptop! However I didn't get beyond the following weird problem: Starting PureData outputting 64 channels via jack as pd -jack -channels 64 works and connects and outputs to the Madiface's hardware outs. If I try to start other audio software (mplayer, alsaplayer) asking them to output to the first two jack outputs (while Pd is also using them), I get in qjackctl's message window no ports available! and in mplayer cannot deliver port registration request [JACK] not enough ports available Failed to initialize audio driver 'jack' and in alsaplayer cannot deliver port registration request cannot deliver port registration request Segmentation fault all followed by a massive xrun in qjackctls message window **** alsa_pcm: xrun of at least 4995.700 msecs Now if I start Pd with less outputs, for examples pd -jack -channels 32 then mplayer is perfectly able to output on the the first two hardware channels in parallel with Pd. The weird thing: Jackd's 'max port' argument is set to 256, and the problem persists also with 512 ports. Am I missing something here? Background info: jackd version 0.124.1 tmpdir /dev/shm protocol 25 is started via qjackctl as jackd -P89 -t5000 -dalsa -r44100 -p256 -n2 -D -Chw:Default -Phw:Default -i64 -o64 on kernel 3.14-2-rt-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT RT Debian 3.14.15-2 (2014-08-09) x86_64 GNU/Linux Thank you for any suggestions! Peter