Yeah, I know what you mean about being frustrated. 1 2 3 4 5

With your CD burning trouble I refer you to Coasterless Burning Guide . In it is a link to another article explaining how to setup your cd drives. I'd post that too, but I'm sleepy now. I'll come back and fix it in an edit or another post, if you need me to.

If you'd start XMMS from a terminal and then post what's output when it crashes that'd be marvelous.

thanks for the link I'll check it out.
I'm starting to think that the audio-trouble related to mp3's is connected to the sound server I'm running...
XMMS doesn't actually crash. That was me being impatient and killing it early . After a minute or so, it does... nothing and the GUI unlocks and it goes back to doing nothing like before.
SO then i decided to change the audio output plugin. it was OSS before, and then i changed it to ALSA. This time, I got

ALSA lib pcm_hw.c:1055snd_pcm_hw_open) open /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p failed: Permission denied

** WARNING **: alsa_setup(): Failed to open pcm device (default): Permission denied


on the command line and a dialog box that said "Please check that: Your soundcard is configured properly You have the correct output plugin selected No other program is blocking the soundcard"

I would guess it's a plug-in problem because if it was hardware, I think that the audio CDs would not play properly either.