As in the subject. I get no sound out of phonon while aplay works fine. This leads me to assume that it is a phonon error. But how to adjust phonon when systemsettings crashes?

Is there anything one can do on the command line?

Many thanks in advance.

PS.: kmix looks totally normal and I checked http://phonon.kde.org/ but it didn't have any relevant info.

Solved - I finally got an error message on the CLI, googled it and had to remove ~/.xine/catalog.cache. After that systemsettings worked fine again but phonon is still not behaving (sigh).

Are you using the Xine backend? As far as I know it's not maintained anymore and another backend is highly recommended.

Yes, I was. Have changed to gstreamer now (wasn't able to beforehand though 'cos systemsettings kept on crashing...). Chicken and egg kind of situation