Jogchum Reitsma posted on Mon, 20 May 2013 20:18:46 +0200 as excerpted:
I have no idea why, but suddenly kde fails to see my Xonar Essence
sound
card.
Yast (I'm running opensuse 12.2 on this box) still has it registered as
the default sound card, and when playng a test sound through Yast, it
works. So it's not a hardware problem.
But kde doesn't see it anymore, it's not listed anymore when
configuring
kmix. It did so for, well, at least over a year...
That's typically a problem with your phonon configuration or the phonon-
backend used.
These are configured in kde settings (accurate kde3 name kcontrol,
inaccurate kde4 name system settings, inaccurate because they're mostly
user-specific kde settings, NOT global system settings, but I believe
OpenSuSE calls them something else again...), hardware, multimedia,
phonon.
The left tab, device preferences, lets you configure for each "sound
role" the device priority stacking order. Try testing each one, and
move
the working ones to the top, then when you have the order you want, hit
the apply device list to... button, and chose the other roles you
want to
apply it to as well.
If you're unhappy with the available list of devices and/or if you have
problems with devices disappearing and "new" ones popping up for no
reason, as I did back some time ago with the now deprecated phonon-xine
backend, consider switching backends. I use the phonon-vlc backend here
and haven't had problems since I switched from phonon-xine to it, but
the
default and now phonon-recommended backend is phonon-gstreamer.
(FWIW, I don't use the gstreamer backend here as many years and ancient
crufty versions ago I had problems with gstreamer, and haven't had it on
my system since. I'm sure it works much better now than it did back
then, but there's a whole gstreamer ecosystem to install (which would
mean building them first, since I'm on gentoo) if I decided to try it,
and there have always been other alternatives that worked fine, so I've
never gotten around to trying it.)
