OK, now please test aplay -v -Ddefault /usr/share/sounds/alsa/test.wav Does it play from somewhere, and what does the command show? Even if the sound backend is gstreamer, gstreamer itself has an audio backend selectively, either ALSA-native, PA, or whatever. So you need to figure out which backend is used there, too. I guess it's PulseAudio as default, though.