when i open audacity it gives me this:

"there was an error initializing the audio i/o layer. you will not be able to play or record audio. error: host error"

what's this about?

if i use a stock kernel, and run it from the shell as root, it works fine. it's only if i try to open it from KDE or if i use the custom kernel i compiled that it gives me that error message.

KDE is using ALSA and i don't think i compiled OSS support into the custom kernel... maybe that's why it only works when i use a stock kernel (that includes OSS support) and run it from a shell?

is this an ALSA\OSS\KDE problem?

maybe it can be solved by compiling OSS support into the kernel and either playing with the KDE settings or running it from a shell?

also... and this is kindof unrelated... but if someone could tell me how to lift audio from a soundboard (flash) and have it as a .wav or .ogg or .mp3, i'd like to be able to do that too...

The problem with Audacity is due to some other app using the soundcard. I get this same error e.g when I have xmms in pause (or playing - evidently). I also got it after using K3B, the only KDE app I use in Gnome. This is due to the fact that K3B uses arts to accss the soundcard for confirmation counds and arts stays loaded afterwards. In order to find the culprit (I believe it's artd but I'm not sure) run

$top | grep arts

This will give you the exact name and the pid which will enable you to kill the process and get sound back in Audacity.