When I boot up my Linux box and start XMMS to play some mp3's, the sound is incredibly low.

However, the trick is to run the "search for sound card" thingy, and the volume gets back.

Btw, the "thingy" is:
/usr/bin/system-config-soundcard

I can probably figure a way to make it run at boot time, but the question is "why do I have to run it in the first place?".

I took a look at KMix and all settings looked alright, as did the sound settings in the KDE Kontrol center.

If I don't run the thingy and start to play with sound, then dmesg gives output like this:

application xmms uses obsolete OSS audio interface
application artsd uses obsolete OSS audio interface
application xmms uses obsolete OSS audio interface

In the Kontrol center, the sound system is set to auto detect.

I'm just puzzled

This seems to be a different kind of problem. However, was your sound card appropriately detected during setup of Linux distro?

At that moment of time, u wud have got a sound that wud be same as the one u have now.

If the sound card is not detected properly, or the driver is not installed or the mixer is not working properly, u may have a sound problem.

Also, just check which plugin is being used by XMMS to play the music files!!

XMMS uses OSS-driver 1.2.10 [libOSS.so] and the MPEG decoder that came bundled with it.

But now the mixer starts up with the system and there's no volume problem, however, it sounds awful. It's like there's an echo, the voices sound distant and the high frequency waves are overpowered.

Sound card driver - this might be the core of the problem. It's some cheap creative creation, but linux claim it's an Ensoniq.

Crap. Found my old driver disc for it - of couse no *nix drivers but it gave the full product name. Then went to Creatives home page, only to find out that it's probably been years since they supported it

A Sound Blaster PCI 128, btw.

Just found that "Ensoniq" is the sound chip..

Googling for driver right now..

ok...so the problem is 50% solved. install the driver and find out.

Forget it. I got better things to do than fixing almost perfectly working sound cards.