I've been having a problem for quite a while of the front volume in alsamixer dropping to zero for no apparent reason. Just now I managed to catch it in the act. I had Amarok running with a playlist consisting of several Internet streams. I had it running on one stream, but after switching to a different stream, I heard only silence. It turned out that again the alsamixer volume had been reset to zero.

I don't understand this, since I would have thought that Amarok wouldn't, and indeed couldn't, change the alsamixer settings. But in this case I was doing nothing else except switching the streams.

Could you please give more details on the following:

Amarok version?
KDE version?
Do you use Pulseaudio?
Which Phonon backend do you use?

Sorry for the much-delayed response. The configuration info is:

Amarok version: 2.4.1
KDE version: 4.7.0
Pulseaudio in use (version 1.0.9:22)
Backend: Xine (version 4:4.7, really 4.4.4-ubuntu3)

I'm running a fully updated Kubuntu Natty (x64) system.

And I'm still having the problem.

Xine is deprecated; you shouldn't use it. GStreamer or VLC are the current backend options. Try one of those and see if the problem persists.

I've switched the backend to Gstreamer and I'm still having the problem of the alsamixer Front volume getting reset to 0 unpredictably. It seems to happen when I switch channels in Amarok, but it might happen at other times also. It's hard to pin down because I don't always see the effect at the time it's happening.

I am struggling with the same issue using the MPlayer backend. Will try VLC’s.

EDIT: It seems to be working fine now.