<p>Hi Rachel,</p><p>I've observed some unusual behaviour with sound in
KDE before. One thing to check. For some reason kde has a setting that
allows it to hog your sound hardware and prevents other applications from
using it. There is a timer that registers if kde sound sits idle for X
seconds it will relinquish this control. There's a chance clicking on
that load volumes button has passed sound control back to kde again. The
length of time for control to be relinquished is adjustable. On my Kubuntu
system it's under System settings -> Sound (unsurprisingly). If you
can find a similar setting try adjusting the time to 0 or 1 seconds,
that's worked for me in the past. It might not be that but it's
worth a go.</p><p>That's a description from a users point of view,
I'm sure someone on this list can give a better technical
explanation.</p><p>hope it
helps.</p><p>Rich </p><p> </p><p> On Nov 7 2006, Rachel
Cavill wrote: <br /><br /> Hi all,<br /> My onboard sound packed in a few
months ago and I finally got around to<br /> replacing it with a new
soundcard last night. After a bit of fiddling with<br /> levels, I had
sound for about 5 minutes, before clicking on a "load volumes"<br
/> button in a gui mixer application. This killed sound and I've been
unable<br /> to resurrect it.<br /> <br /> The place where I clicked is
found in mandrake under<br /> system/KDE/sound/mixer. This brings up a
diaglog box which only seems to<br /> save/load volume settings from file.
However, the really puzzling thing is<br /> that all the graphical mixing
level tools (like aumix and the graphical<br /> volume tool of snackamp)
which normally work for adjusting the sound are not<br /> working - they
all say that volume is up.<br /> <br /> So it looks to me like I've got
a file somewhere which is telling it to<br /> mute, which is overriding the
volume controls I can see in aumix etc.<br /> <br /> Any ideas, how to get
sound working again?<br /> Rachel<br /> </p>