This sounds a bit like what Mark Knecht was describing that was happening with his HDSP he downgraded the HDSP firmware from rev 68 to rev 65...

I'd like to get an ALSA-compatible sound card (PCI) for an older machine. This would be for non-critical music playback, and would be replacing an ISA SB16. Economy is the goal here. I'm aware of the ALSA sound card matrix, but it does not provide list prices for each card, nor does it indicate whether a particular card is even on the market. Would anyone be willing to offer a recommendation?

Hi, Matt again. So if you remember I have this problem where my hdsp freezes any time I use play (or any app that utilizes the play program, like maybe (?) audacity...). When I use play, it plays the soundfile, but afterward, I can't open any programs that would use my soundcard (some open but say it can't find the device or that the device is in use). When I run "ps aux" there's no indication of play being there. However, when I run play and it gets to the end of the soundfile, I hear what sounds like an amp clip, and I get this: /usr/bin/play: line 205: 1686 Segmentation fault sox $volume $fopts $fopts2 "$filename" $arch_defines $device $effects The 1686 before the Segmentation fault seems to change depending on the soundfile (1802 is another I've had)... I'm not really sure what that number is. So I opened up my /usr/bin/play in vi to see what was in line 205 (I've displayed the last bit of the program): # If name is "rec" then record else assume user is wanting to play # a sound file. if [ "$program_name" = "rec" ]; then # Don't send data to stdout if they are reading from it. if [ "$filename" = "-" ]; then echo "Send break (control-c) to end recording" 1>&2 else echo "Send break (control-c) to end recording" fi sox $volume $arch_defines $fopts $device $fopts2 "$filename" $effects else sox $volume $fopts $fopts2 "$filename" $arch_defines $device $effects fi Line 205 is the final fi, but the line above that is the one that appears in the "error" message I get running play. Is there something in that line (or the rest of the program) that I should change to get it to work with my hdsp? I have an onboard nVidia soundcard that works with play just fine, and aplay works fine with both cards. Is it a problem in the play program, or maybe the alsa hdsp driver I'm using? Another thing I noticed is that when I use play, the signal is being sent to all the channels on the hdspmixer, whereas when I use aplay, it sends it just to the first two. What gives? Also, when this happens, I've been rebooting the machine... is there a way maybe to restart alsa instead? Thanks, Matt