I am going to bring this question to this mail list as I think it is more apropos to discuss it here... I have just been through a proverbial nightmare trying to configure sound on my system and getting some of the various tools to work. Am running under SuSE11.2 x86_64, KDE 4.4.2. I will admit up front I am NOT a Linux guru but I am enough of a software engineer to recognize an overly complex architecture when I see one. In all of my wanderings around the internet and maillists, I have discovered there as so many different layers, tools and configuration requirements that I have got to wonder if there is any sort of overall sound system-architecture vision in place and a GUI guide for users, being developed, to follow. We have got LAYERS and LAYERS of ALSA, ESOUND, JACK, OSS, ESD, aRTs, PULSEAUDIO, GSTREAMER, PHONON and tools like XINE, KAFFEINE, MYTHTV and MPLAYER which go off in their own directions... codecs to locate... I mean seriously folks, for a user to set up and configure a sound system this is getting out of control! How to choose? What to choose? What and how to configure? What to install? How to hook up and link together? And NO this is far from an automated process of any sort, and NO it is NOT transparent to a user! I KNOW I just went through hell just trying to get Amarok to play (and XINE and KAFFEINE as well) along with the projectM-pulseaudio visualization tool.. Just to cite my latest headache as an example, (and this was just one of many I had!!!) I found that running projectM-pulseaudio, which is suppose to connect to the pulseaudio sound server, randomly chooses which sound device on my system as its "connectHelper". (I had two, one of which was actually DISABLED in YaST but apparently that has no effect on projectM-pulseaudio!!) And projectM often chose the disabled sound device which left it unresponsive to sound output from any of the other applications. Here is another - I discovered that XINE and KMIX were each acting as if they had control over the master volume level setting! I had a horrible time tracking down why KAFFIENE was not playing anything until I happened on and installed the XINE-GUI application and within it I discovered that it too had a sense of volume control. When I turned it up, KAFFIENE started working fine! It was as if XINE and KMIX were in a series connection too because once I turned up the volume level in XINE-GUI I could also control the volume level with KMIX! IMHO this is a horrid architectural flaw and can cause users endless amounts of grief trying to figure out why something like KAFFIENE is not working for them. One and ONLY one master volume level control should be allowed/active at a time per sound device, but this sort of error arises when no one is overseeing the overall sound architecture. Same goes for Mute controls, another really nasty problem I had tracking down in KMIX... I have no idea how to track down where such a problem really lies and what I must do to configure things correctly. YaST? PulseAudio? ProjectM? Is this a bug or is something misconfigured? Especially given this extremely complex sound architecture, how do I differentiate? Very few of the application GUI setup tools come with much in the way of guiding me to a solution and none are presenting me with a clear picture of just how everything works together with confidence building test procedures. The KDE Systems Settings for Multimedia does not present very many options either , with little guidance, and I even noted the loss of the old ALSA configuration tool. I suspect some architect(s) is trying to simplify what a user has to configure, but hiding configuration options does not allow a GUI to guide a user to a solution. It only makes it harder to find one when the GUI fails to achieve a satisfactory result. The designer(s) of the KDE Systems Settings GUI are correct in believing that it is not a good idea to simply offer all configuration options in a flat view either, but a well design GUI will guide a user to properly apply and set configurations options as needed until a satisfactory result can be achieved for that user's purposes. Websites I visited give me a rather complicated picture (probably outdated too in most cases) of their own perspective of the sound architecture but nowhere am I ever presented with a clear picture of how all these different components actually work and/or connect/integrate together and what applications use them, how and how to configure.... Is there any hope in the near future that this will get simpler and easier for us poor audiophiles? Will appreciate hearing thoughts and NO I am not intending to throw rocks... Just that if I had such a hard time, I got to wonder how others are fairing and I think providing feedback and starting discussions is useful to engineers... Marc...