Sound was generally working fine on my Mandriva 2007 workstation, but sound in the Flash plugin was not. Here's how I debugged the problem and fixed it.

First, running Firefox from a terminal provided a great clue. To launch Firefox this way it may work to use Alt-F2 to have the run box appear, and then type "mozilla-firefox" and make sure "Run in terminal" is selected".

This should lots of ALSA-related errors, including "device not found".

By launching the Mandriva Control Center (Alt-F2 then 'mcc'), I was able to review the sound drivers in use. I navigated to "Hardware : Look and Configure Hardware" and then selected my soundcard below the "Soundcard" option. My soundcard was listed as "82801EB AC'97 Audio". From there, I could select "Run Config Tool", which provided a list of driver options. Only one of them was listed as "ALSA", so I switched the driver to that.

Jokosher is a simple and powerful multi-track studio that uses Gstreamer. It provides a complete application for recording, editing, mixing and exporting audio, and has been specifically designed with usability in mind. The developers behind Jokosher have re-thought audio production at every level, and are creating something devilishly simple to use. It was started by Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager for Canonical, and one of the hosts of LugRadio because Jono admitted that LugRadio is recorded in qbase in Widows. To which a bunch of the listeners "gave him a kicking. Less than a year ago they started this project and are about to release 0.9. 0.9 is really 1.0 but Jono and the team refuse to call it 1.0 until they have support for multiple input sound cards, this is not really a Jokosher problem but is an ALSA problem. If nothing else this project is improving Gstreamer and ALSA.

I was disappointed that Realplayer 10 wouldn't play this RealAudio stream I made several years ago, using official Real-branded tools as I recall. Instead, the message returned is:

The content you are trying to play uses an audio codec that is obsolete and no longer supported. Please contact the content provider about using a supported codec.

It appears Real quit supporting their own format. However, the open source totem player had no problem with it.

If you're looking for an open source alternative for iTunes, Windows Media Player, WinAmp or any other similar application I highly recommend amaroK. It has some very nice features such as lyric and Wikipedia integration and auto album art retrival, none of which are available on most other applications.

AmaroK will most likely be the default music player for Linux distributions that use KDE, such as Mandriva.