KDE4 Strange Audio Problems
 

I just upgraded to KDE4 (on Debian testing) and something strange is going on with the audio.

When I log in, the system plays the appropriate audio but also pops up a little notification saying "The audio playback device Intel ... does not work falling back to default".

The notification doesn't bother me but the problem is that Amarok, Kaffeine or VLC aren't able to output any sound.

When I go into System Settings -> Multimedia, select my audio driver and click "Test" it also doesn't play any sound and displays the exact same notification I got above.

Here's the kicker - when I log out - it plays the audio normally??

So obviously the correct drivers are available to play audio but for some reason it only does it during log in and log out.

Any ideas on how to solve this would be brighten up my weekend very much!

I have ALSA installed and the backend is Gstreamer.

This sounds like the problems I was having with Pulse Audio. Very similar. I deactivated Pulse, activated aRts, voila, things were normal again.

I played with it a lot to try and get Pulse to work normally, but no dice.

Solved it by installing phonon-backend-xine

Oh, a thousand blessings upon you, Sir! This was driving me NUTS! :D