covici at ccs.covici.com <covici at ccs.covici.com> wrote: > OK, here is what is happening to me with pulseaudio. Normally, I have > in my /etc/pulse/client.conf spawn=no, and things going to alsa, like > mplayer work correctly. paplay says connection refused. Now if I > change spawn=yes, as a normal user both paplay and mplayer think they > are playing, but they are silent. If there's a PulseAudio daemon running at this point, then presumably they're both using it. If I remember correctly, list-sink-inputs will show you which applications are connected. Obviously you aren't hearing any output, so I would check the default sink to see where it's going, and also check the volume (as set in PulseAudio) in case that's an issue. The help text of pacmd should give you the specific commands to use. Gentoo will be configured differently from Debian by default, I suspect. It's also possible that there are bugs involved (but if you're running the latest "unstable" Gentoo, that's a risk you're knowingly taking).