toad wrote:BTW, are you certain that this is a KDE problem? I don't remember reading tests with other environments.

No, it is a combined problem where I think pulseaudio, alsa and KMix are invlolved.

KMix doesn't restore the last settings: IMHO a KDE problem.
KMix hiding most audio settings when pulseaudio is active: don't know whether that is a bug, feature or by design. Anyway it makes matters extremely complicated when settings are hidden and remain hidden whatever you do.
Alsa should restore all its settings when alsactl restore is called, and not skip a few. This might be a pulseaudio or alsa problem.
Distorted sound in GUI applications, but not in arecord when pulseaudio is not installed: I have no idea what breaks this.

About the last issue: on yet another computer I have the same distorted sound. When I start arecord once, the sound stays right in GUI applications. I run Debian Squeeze (Stable) on both machines, and both machine should run identical kernels and drivers, altough hardware is significantly different.

jlinkels

Ah, thanks. If you think it is down to kmix, have you looked at your kmixrc (please don't say that this has been covered already or I shall get a shovel and dig a big hole for myself...)?

I also remember reading something about a bug in Debian to do with kmixrc - wait ... here http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=407598

I had seen a part of that bug report somewhere else. It states that if you want to retain the audio settings you should not allow KDE to remember its settings. This is according with my own experience.

However this post is much longer and I have to read it carefully to see what it is all about before I make comments. I will do that later and report back.

jlinkels