Brian Mury wrote: >> 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've checked again on my laptop; amarok will not run if pulseaudio is running. It comes up with the error message, "Audio output unavailable; the device is busy". There is a reference to xine , but this is not explicit. I take it "the device" is /dev/snd . If so, it would improve matters slightly if this was explicitly stated. As soon as I kill pulseaudio, amarok works. (Incidentally, KsCD works without killing pulseaudio.) Are amarok and pulseaudio actually incompatible? Does anyone have both running at the same time? Or maybe there is some xine setting that I should adjust?