Odd that you should have to move that object out of the loop. I'll have to check my process list to make sure I don't have an abundance of mpg321s around myself. Since the object goes out of scope after each song, one would hope that would kill the process... or that the process would die when it is done playing the file... or both. On my machine, if I didn't do that I seemed to have trouble getting /dev/dsp free for festival again. Thanks for pointing this out. I'll have to look into it.