I upgraded both ALSA and gstreamer recently. Since then, amarok sounds \'tinny\', i.e. like a cheap old transistor radio (if you kids remember those).

gst-launch foo.mp3 ! mad ! alsasink sounds fine though.

Any ideas?

Got the equalizer enabled, by any chance?

No, but I played around some more, and the plot thickens: when I use the osssink instead of the alsasink in amarok, it sounds much better.

I must admit that the whole abstraction layering of linux sound systems still befuddles me. As I understand it now, I\'m running

amarok -> gstreamer -> oss -> alsa -> hardware

Or are the oss and alsa layers reversed?

In any case, I guess that

amarok -> gstreamer -> alsa -> hardware

would be preferred, no?