I'm running Debian (KDE). Sound was working fine until I did an aptitude upgrade and now all of my programs which use artsd (KDE System Notifications, JuK, amaroK, Noatun) either crash or are silent. No errors when starting the sound server in Control Panel and I have used alsamixer to make sure my levels are good. I also checked my levels with kmix. XMMS works great and amaroK at least plays if I set the engine to gstreamer instead of xine (though it is very unstable and crashes if I pause or stop a song). What am I doing wrong? Below is a list of programs which work and those which don't. Thanks!

Working:
play works fine
aplay works fine
alsaplayer works fine
XMMS works fine
amaroK (using gstreamer engine) kind-of works
mplayer (works but sometimes hiccups if I'm doing something else CPU intensive)

Not Working:
JuK (plays approx 1 sec, no crash but no sound)
amaroK (plays approx 1 sec, looping, have to kill to stop)
Xine (plays approx 1 sec before crashing, no sound)
GXine (plays approx 1 sec before crashing, no sound)
"Test Sound" in kcontrol (just silence, no error)
artsplay (just silence, no error)
Noatun (no sound, loops opening file when play is pressed)

Anyone have a suggestion on what to try?

Anyone? Please? I'd really like to use amaroK or JuK to listen to my music collection. Not to mention using gxine and KDE sounds.

Downgrade the arts package of KDE to the version wich worked before.
That's what I had to do on my machine recently.
The newer artsd didn't work well for me.

How do I find out what version that is?

Better question, how do I downgrade it?