i want to thank whoever explained the plug: vs hw: differences - ive been struggling for weeks trying to get amarok to make sound, only to give up and go back to mplayer. it turned out all i needed to do was preface hw or dmix with 'plug'...but this only works with gstreamer. helix is broken and XINE says it cant find any audio devices, even though it has ALSA support compiled in, and aplay -l lists stuff just fine (mainly, i think my 'default' doesnt work (perhaps defautling to hw, and not plughw?), but i have no idea how to fix that) i cant help but think theres a refactoring waiting to happen - it appears 'plug' is doing some type of sample format conversion voodoo, but then a different layer is needed to provide decoding facilities to apps, and this layer (the gstreamer/esound/polyp/arts/xine's of the world) cant even connect to JACK. the jackplug via ALSA hack is buggy and unstable, and surely not the way signal flow was meant to be arranged anyways. plus it seems gstreamer removed their JACK sink entirely in 0.10 (why??? - well, i know why, as i hacked the autotools files of the prior version, and was greeted with all sorts of errors when even trying to use it from the gst-test apps). i wouldnt really mind just using dmix or something, if it actually worked at the same time JACk does (it doesnt). not to mentino DMIX doesnt even work at all on my 'professional' card, but works fine on the horrid biltin chip which has so much noise leak that its unusable.. i guess i will just write a nice audio player as a DSSI plugin, and add a scripting layer to hook into amarok's database schema, since that seems easier than fighting with all of the above :) i just want to hear music damnit.... </rant>