Comment 7 for bug 86325

I just ran into this bug as well. Using Kubuntu 9.04 (KDE 4.2.4) and an Maudio Delta Audiophile 2496. The funny thing is that this is a quite fresh install and everything worked fine until a day ago when I installed, then uninstalled some gstreamer-related packages (libgstreamer0.10-dev, gstreamer0.10-alsa, ...). Then suddenly the soundcard was not recognized at all anymore. I had to power down the machine, remove the card, power it up again, then repeat with the card reinserted. But now the internal clock rate is stuck at ICE958 (the S/PDIF) which I don't use so the card has no valid clock rate set. This results in no output at all from the soundcard and applications that play sound freeze one way or the other.

Even funnier is that I just rebooted and had a look at alsamixer on a virtual console, i.e. *before* logging into KDE. There it was no problem to set the internal clock rate to something other than ICE958. I set it to 96000 and tested with aplay /usr/share/sounds/k3b_success.wav which worked fine.

*Then* logging into KDE I found that the problematic control was stuck again and there was no way to set it to anything else. I have no idea if this is KDE-specific (Phonon?) or a general problem with desktop environments that provide some level of control over the sound hardware/API. But it definitely depends on whether KDE is running or not: logging out and checking alsamixer on a virtual console I was able to set the internal clock rate again.

I am not sure how to debug this properly or what part of KDE is responsible here.