Not really an answer to your question, but if you can tolerate some small extra latency (at least if your card doesn't support hardware mixing), set up JACK to use the "default" device rather than "hw:0", that way it should play nicer with other apps (as "default" normally uses either hardware or software ("dmix") mixing to allow multiple applications to output sound at the same time). Note that you may also have to set the other app up to use "default", hopefully you can figure out which it is. Kevin Kofler