Today, Jon asks:

Hi Matt,

I’ve found your blog and videos to be of excellent help! I’m new to Linux- I’ve been running Kubuntu Feisty 7.04 for about two weeks, and I’ve spent hours researching how to get my machine to work. That is why I really appreciate what you and people like you are doing.

Anyway, I have two questions for you:

1. I watched your tutorial to set up a default sound card, which works great for the external USB soundcard I have running to my stereo system. Unfortunately, it seems like this card can only handle one task at a time. For example, if I have a music player running (quietly), and decide to watch another one of your tutorials, whichever program needing sound is run second (or third, fourth, etc) will only use the onboard sound, not the external soundcard. Is there a way to fix that? I hate having to restart the OS’s sound just to get sound through my stereo speakers.

2. I have a recurring error with Konqueror… I don’t know if you can help with this one. I’ve searched high and low, to no avail. I downloaded Songbird (a great multimedia app- kinda like windows media player meets firefox). When I first untar’d it on the desktop, it created a folder called “Songbird”. No problem there. Once I got the program up and running, I moved the folder into /home/xxxx. Now, whenever I start the OS, I immediately get an error from Konqueror, telling me that /home/Desktop/Songbird no longer exists. “I KNOW that!” I experimented by putting that folder back, and the error didn’t show up. But if I move the folder back to the directory I want it to be in (/home/user/), I get that error. WTF?

No idea why or how Konqueror integrates with Songbird, as it is a standalone application. So I won’t be much help there. As for your sound card query. This video below provides an explanation of how to deal with this without rebooting your PC.

So in short:

1. Close the music application, as it will tie up the default card.
2. Close the browser window.
3. Reopen the browser window and then watch the Flash video of your choice.

It should be noted that if you simply wanted to listen to both at the same time, using both cards is actually rather handy. Hope this helps to clear the air some.

Do you have an Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Simply Mepis, Linspire/Freespire or PCLinuxOS related question? Perhaps you are just burnt out on writing on the walls with crayons? Whatever the comments may be, drop me a line, and you too can “Just Ask Matt”- Linux Edition!

[tags]sound card, USB headset, mp3 player[/tags]