Hi folks !!!
I am happy. As I write this I am listening to Mozart's 'Eine kleine Nachtmusik' courtesy of KsCD. Now this is odd. After posting my initial complaint yesterday I had not altered any more settings. I booted up this morning and found that KDE was giving me sound on icon manipulations, the first time since the new kernel upgrade.
Prior to posting this topic, I had carried out a major kernel upgrade (which was followed by a regular update, upgrade & dist-upgrade sequence on 6 nov). I also installed 2 HAL components (hal-device-manager & hal-doc).
This was followed by a shutdown, sound card removal, blow clean of the PCI interfaces, sound card replacement, machine start up and accessing KMix, turning on and adjusting the Master and PCM controls. Still no sound at all (speakers were definitely plugged in and switched on). As said at the beginning of this thread, pressing the "Test Sound" button in Control Center > Sound & Multimedia > Sound System was THE ONLY time I got any sound. It was after this that I posted my complaint here and not long after, shutdown the machine overnight.
I booted up this morning to find that I had sound each time a KDE icon was manipulated. Now I was excited !! Naturally, I inserted a CD and accessed KsCD and pressed play. CD played with NO sound. I then carried out the following actions: > KsCD > Extras > Configure KsCD > CD Player > Placed a tick in the check box "Use direct digital playback" and at "Select audio backend" I chose "arts". RESULT: Success !! Hence the Mozart.
Further testing using "alsa" as the audio backend would allow sound output ONLY during the CURRENT KsCD session on which the configuration had been made, if I was lucky. Subsequent re-launch of KsCD would, on the majority of attempts, yield the following warning dialogue: "CD-ROM read or access error (or no audio disc in drive). Please make sure you have access permissions to: /dev/cdrom". After this KsCD would not play.
Selecting "arts" as the audio backend has so far, been a success on every occasion. I have yet to test after a KDM shutdown, machine re-boot and shutdown.
