HI all, I managed to combine 2 Sb Live (a 5.1 Digital and a 5.1 Player one) in a single 4 in 4 out device following the El-Cheapo HOWTO. The thing used to work flawlessly on my system: Slackware 10.1 kernel 2.6.12.2 vanilla (but older versions worked equally well) ALSA 1.0.8 JACK 0.99.0 all compiled from sources AMD Athlon XP 3000+ AsRock K7S8X SB Live! Digital 5.1 SB Live! Player 5.1 ForteMedia FM801 RTL8139 Matrox G450 DualHead AGP every card runs on its own IRQ: root@slack101-sal:/home/salvuz# cat /proc/interrupts CPU0 0: 3067468 IO-APIC-edge timer 1: 4252 IO-APIC-edge i8042 8: 0 IO-APIC-edge rtc 9: 0 IO-APIC-level acpi 12: 68805 IO-APIC-edge i8042 14: 130386 IO-APIC-edge ide0 15: 107823 IO-APIC-edge ide1 16: 0 IO-APIC-level FM801 17: 2080 IO-APIC-level eth0 18: 1138 IO-APIC-level EMU10K1 19: 0 IO-APIC-level EMU10K1 20: 0 IO-APIC-level ohci_hcd:usb2 21: 0 IO-APIC-level ohci_hcd:usb3 23: 0 IO-APIC-level ehci_hcd:usb1 NMI: 0 LOC: 3067418 ERR: 0 MIS: 0 With this setup I was used to little or no xruns even at 128 frames per buffer. But upon upgrading to ALSA 1.0.9 (and later releases) I get (no matter if via command line or qjackctl): root@slack101-sal:/home/salvuz# jackd -R -v -dalsa -d multi4 getting driver descriptor from /usr/lib/jack/jack_dummy.so getting driver descriptor from /usr/lib/jack/jack_oss.so getting driver descriptor from /usr/lib/jack/jack_alsa.so jackd 0.99.0 Copyright 2001-2003 Paul Davis and others. jackd comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; see the file COPYING for details registered builtin port type 32 bit float mono audio running with uid=0 and euid=0, will not try to use capabilites loading driver .. new client: alsa_pcm, id = 1 type 1 @ 0x805bad0 fd = -1 creating alsa driver ... multi4|multi4|1024|2|48000|0|0|nomon|swmeter|-|32bit configuring for 48000Hz, period = 1024 frames, buffer = 2 periods Couldn't open multi4 for 32bit samples trying 24bit instead Couldn't open multi4 for 24bit samples trying 16bit instead Couldn't open multi4 for 32bit samples trying 24bit instead Couldn't open multi4 for 24bit samples trying 16bit instead new buffer size 1024 registered port alsa_pcm:capture_1, offset = 4096 registered port alsa_pcm:capture_2, offset = 8192 registered port alsa_pcm:capture_3, offset = 12288 registered port alsa_pcm:capture_4, offset = 16384 registered port alsa_pcm:playback_1, offset = 0 registered port alsa_pcm:playback_2, offset = 0 registered port alsa_pcm:playback_3, offset = 0 registered port alsa_pcm:playback_4, offset = 0 ++ jack_rechain_graph(): client alsa_pcm: internal client, execution_order=0. -- jack_rechain_graph() 4576 waiting for signals [sits there for about seven seconds...] jackd watchdog: timeout - killing jackd Killed root@slack101-sal:/home/salvuz# zlorfik! :) If I reinstall _only_ alsa-lib-1.0.8 (having removed alsa-lib-1.0.9) keeping the reast of ALSA to 1.0.9, everything returned to work, so I think something changed in alsa lib 1.0.9 that causes trouble to this setup... Anyone else tried building an El-Cheapo multi I/O and noticed the same thing with alsa-lib 1.0.8->1.0.9 ? ciao -- salvuz POST FATA RESVRGO Linux registered user #291700 | machine #174619 get counted on ---> http://counter.li.org/ <---