The issue at hand is actually that, unless you've manually adjusted Phonon's preferences in System Settings, you've got two settings that clash if you have PulseAudio installed(, too):
1) by default, Phonon ships, in Kubuntu, with ALSA's 'default' virtual device as the primary; 2) if you somehow have acquired PulseAudio, it starts automatically ("autospawns") whenever an ALSA client attempts to access the 'default' virtual device. Now, you would think that, given that clients accessing 'default' are routed through PA, everything is peachy. But this is (obviously) not the case. Apps can still use the 'plughw' virtual device or the 'hw' virtual device (the latter of which PulseAudio does, to a degree), both of which will override/take preference over 'default', which means that once PA resumes from its two-second idle period (during which it relinquishes the audio devices), it will find the audio devices in use and fall back to the dummy/null sink. This explanation is a very long way of saying the following: If you use Kubuntu and have PulseAudio installed, you need to configure Phonon in System Settings to prefer the PulseAudio output/input for all the profiles, otherwise you're flirting with disaster! (just joking about disaster, but, well...) -- kubuntu Karmic can't output sound at the same time https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/447844 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs