Kde no sound from Phonon or most KDE apps but mplayer,skype and firefox are ok

"Try going to the Backend tab and see which is the top preferred selection, and perhaps change it to prefer one over the other. For good measure may as well re-compile media-sound/phonon and all it's audio-related deps while you're at it.

All those other apps don't give a hoot about Phonon, so that's why they work.

For reference, I also run a Gentoo desktop w/ KDE4 (4.3.4) and set xine as my preferred backend with GStreamer as second. I never had a problem with mine, and have been ""emerge -uD world""-ing since 2008.0"

"For me the issue is a combination of suck: phonon and pulseaudio. Try deleting the pulseaudio settings in your home dir. Maybe reboot. I forget what happened to fix it but I haven't been having the problem too much lately. However I still get errors like that every once in awhile. I use Debian/Lenny and Ubuntu 9.10.

Maybe someday Linux will get a stable sound system. One would think that it would be a solved problem by now..."