[Jayce]

Long story short, I have Hardy 64 bit.
I'm running ALSA audio.
I tried to install Pulse but it turned out to be a major headache and offered me no benefits that I would use.
I went back to the simple but working ALSA.

I had it set up like this with Amarok.

Sys-Pref-Sounds = Everything ALSA.
Amarok = ALSA.

However, one day I booted up Ubuntu and put Amarok on. I had Firefox previously opened and suddenly I got an error, something about xine was unable to initialize any audio drivers. Hmm... confused now.

So I go back and change everything to auto detect. Now it works. wtf?

What it comes down to is this... If I have sys-pref-sounds to ALSA, everything is fine. However, Amarok itself must be at auto detect. Is that normal? I thought it was better to have everything directly input as the audio device you are using, in this case for me, ALSA.

Also - if I recall, last night, I wasn't able to get audio from Audacious, however, with Amarok (auto detect) and Alsa running, that particular application was fine. But Audacious wasn't running too hot. It'd open, yet, did nothing. Just sat there. Idle.

I heard a rumor that there's a bug with FF3 that interferes with xine, so perhaps that's my issue since I have youtube running all the time.

Any ideas? I'm looking to understand why Amarok must be auto detect and not Alsa, and I'm also looking to figure out how Audacious can run again. I should have tried Audacious as auto detect, but I didn't think about it.