Comment 18 for bug 61211

Let me add another reason that it is an unhelpful error message:

*** What is meant by "in the Multimedia settings"? ***

I am running LInux Mint 4.0 (basically Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon with extra codecs), and my Gnome menu doesn't list any program called "Multimedia." So what am I supposed to fiddle with? We do have Administration / Services / Audio settings management (alsa-utils), and Preferences / Sound, and a whole Sound and Video submenu ... or I could open gnome-volume-control, which allows me to tweak Alsa mixer settings, from the right-click menu of the volume control icon on the panel ...

At a minimum, could someone fix the error message to tell us which of these to fiddle with?

The particular details of my situation are perhaps off-topic for a bug about an error message, but just to flesh out the picture: This bug comes and goes for me, without my attaching any other hardware. Sound Recorder can be working fine, but then crashes with this message when I try to open a new file in it. (Yes, software sound mixing is turned on.) Usually restarting Sound Recorder works okay; but today I am getting the error message immediately whenever I start Sound Recorder. Here's the bug trace today (thanks, Alvaro):

   $ gnome-sound-recorder --gst-debug-level=2
   0:00:00.202968000 21830 0x805e408 WARN alsa pcm_hw.c:1242:snd_pcm_hw_open: alsalib error: open /dev/snd/pcmC0D0c failed: Invalid argument
   0:00:00.203016000 21830 0x805e408 WARN alsa pcm_dsnoop.c:606:snd_pcm_dsnoop_open: alsalib error: unable to open slave
   0:00:00.203065000 21830 0x805e408 WARN alsa gstalsasrc.c:600:gst_alsasrc_open:<alsasrc0> error: Recording open error on device 'default': Invalid argument

This seems perhaps consistent with ^rooker's diagnosis above. However, his or her solution doesn't work in my case:
   $ asoundconf list
   Names of available sound cards:
   Intel
   $ asoundconf set-default-card Intel