Alright, I have had this pain in the a** for the last several days and I found out that not only me but also several others on this board.

What happened was, after being able to listening to music normally, after a reboot, everything just went muted.

I found out that KAMix reports the Audio Device to be USB0. And it turned out that it is referring to my webcam which has an integrated mic on it. After pulling out the USB cable of the webcam, to my relief, my sound works like a charm ( I had to remove and re-configure the sound card though).

Thus my question is: how can I change my default sound device to be my NFORCE (hw:0) not USB?

I tried to look for it in the control panel and yast but to no avail. Hopefully someone might give me a direction, so that I can replug-in my webcam without fearing it going to interfere with my Linux experience.

Sounds like you need to add an .asoundrc file. It passes sound configuration parameters to alsa so alsa knows what devices to use, amongst other things. Here's a link to the alsa website page that has to do with the Nforce boards:

http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc...odule=intel8x0

Towards the bottom of the page you will see that several users have added example .asoundrc files, you might be able to use one of these for your setup although you might have to expierament a little. What you need is an .asoundrc file that tells alsa the right device to use is "hw:0,0" . Here's an example of my .asoundrc file on FC2 with a Nforce2 board:

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "swmixer"
}

pcm.swmixer {
type dmix
ipc_key 1234
slave {
pcm "hw:0,0"
period_time 0
period_size 1024
buffer_size 4096
rate 44100
}
}

Of course I'm assuming that your using alsa instead of oss.

thanks a lot, i would check that out. But also, it seems that the problem with arts persists. I have to disable it in order for any kind of audio player to play (xmms, rhythmbox, juk).

Do you happen to know how I can also circumvent this?

It seems that arts can't use alsa directly so you have to configure it to use esound in the kde control center. Here's a link to the page I used to set my FC2 system up with: http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?pa...nd+dirty+HOWTO