Thats because the only digital option is HDMI. that doesn't get sound of the optical link for me. I'll give a reboot and see what it does.

are you frickin kidding me!!!!!!!!!!! I rebooted. fired up pandora and i heard joyous melodies. Lets just say you worked some kind of miracle. we're officially best friends lol

no we are not young man!!!!!

I have asked you twice now thrice to edit page one reply 23 and get rid of that quote box for /var/lib/alsa/asound.state

2) if not, report to madame lash for a spanking---giggles

Ooooh i thought you meant edit and delete it off my computer. didnt realize you were talking about the reply.

hahaha i did now.

so you have you got that asound.state file back or not?

if we are all good you can mark this post as solved.

thanks for edit reply 23.

2) as you are still in school I hope you don't mind me giving you some advice

I back up my system partitions with a live usb stick that has fsarchiver on it.
but that product is also on a live cd such as
http://www.sysresccd.org/SystemRescueCd_Homepage

b) alternative is partimage but that can not image ext4 and is much slower than fsarchiver

3) I too make mistakes, giggles
so fsarchiver will allow you to make mistakes and recover from them

it also helps to make a backup of your image to dvdrw or cloud mode or external large usb drive etc

Don't forget to have a backup of your MBR unless you are using GPT
----being an old timer, I still have a MBR
info is at link

good luck

I got it back.

I sym link important things to me like android sdk, fstab, bash profile, dropbox, cxoffice, steam, VirtualBox VMs from a secondary drive to my system drive and have backups of those. when it comes time to update the distro to a newer version its a seemless process.