On Fri, 2008-04-04 at 14:29 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote: > There seem to be a vast number of sound applications > competing for use. Yes, and that is not a bad thing. There are a lot of car companies selling different cars too. Choice is good. Use what you like, don't use what you don't like. > What exactly is the relation between pulseaudio and amarok? In a nutshell: Amarok is an application for playing music. PulseAudio is a layer that sits between the application and the hardware. > I see on my KDE system I also have KDE=>Multimedia=>CD Player > but I have no idea what application this refers to. > Clicking on it does not produce any sound, in any case. I use Gnome, not KDE, but I would expect it is an application to play audio CDs using the computer's CD drive. I have a similar menu item in Gnome that runs gnome-cd, the Gnome CD player application > KDE=>System=>Soundcard Detection seems to me completely useless. > It either tells me that sound is working, which I already know, > or else that it is not working. > I cannot see what function this program could possibly serve, It detects and configures your sound devices, and provides you some basic control over them. If your soundcard is working, you don't need to run it. > unless one has more than one soundcard, > which surely is extremely rare. It is more common than you think. I have three sound cards in this computer. > RealPlayer, mplayer, helix, amarok, KsCD, KMix - > is there any end to this ... In the context of your subject line, this is not a Fedora issue, and it is not a mess. Go buy a new stereo system and see how many options there are. Why can't we just have one stereo system? Because people have different needs and different preferences.
