Comment 56 for bug 437192

I tried a different approach to get the microphone in skype working: simply deinstalling pulseaudio under synaptic and rebooting. Sure enough, mic worked in skype, and rythmbox, yootube video, and mythtv-frontend all give sound simultaneously (quite a cacophony, but it works).

However, totem plays video but only without sound. When starting the sound recorder it complains that "Your audio capture settings are invalid. Please correct them with the "Sound Preferences" under the System-Preferences menu.", but when calling the sound preferences, an info box pops up saying "Waiting for sound system to respond" and that's it; it never responds. So I also have no loudspeaker icon in the panel, and loudness also cannot be changed via the keyboard.

I share Bruce's view on pulse audio, which looks a lot like beta software