I have just installed the alsa packages and run alsamixer. Everything went very smoothly. I placed a CD in the CDROM to test things. The CD plays but there are interuptions every five seconds or so - it is a bit like what happens when streaming audio over the net and and the buffer cannot keep up so there is an interuption whilst the data stream catches up. I tried xmms and tcd just in case it was the player. I am using an AMD64 3000 with 1.5Gig of ram so there will not be any resource problems. Any idea what I need to?

Thanks.

BTW - running etch.

Not sure if this is a problem, but is DMA enabled on the CDROM drive? You can check it with "hdparm /dev/hdX" where X is the letter for the CDROM device.

I have checked this and the settings are the same as with my Slackware install that does not suffer the same problems:

/dev/hdc:
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)

Thanks for the suggestion but I guess I need to look elsewhere?