input: [Author] tuxchick Aug 14, 2009 12:43 AM EDT [Content] 
output: After spending an hour struggling to make Firefox play sound through my USB headset, and cussing Gnome's infinitely irritating habit of hiding the real application names, and carefully concealing everything useful and making sure you have no idea WTF command you're actually messing with, I changed my mind. The article is not nearly ranty enough. Growl! Foam!! Stab!! Die Gnome slowly and painfully, hahahaaaa in fear and agony. Would a nice little Help-About be too much to ask? Apparently yes. For anyone else struggling with this problem, this is what worked on 64 Studio, which I don't know if it customizes Gnome or horks it like Ubuntu. But by god it works now. Firefox looks only for the default sound card, so first use asoundconf to find your sound card names, and then to set the default to your USB device. Do this only as an ordinary user, not as root: $ asoundconf list Names of available sound cards: NVidia MobilePre Headset $ asoundconf set-default-card Headset Then go into Preferences-> Sound and set the 'Sound Events' and 'Music and Movies' playback to ALSA. I don't know if Firefox needs to be restarted; I'm so vexed and rummy I forgot and I don't care either. You figure it out. It seems that setting these to USB Audio should work, but once it did and once it didn't, so this might not be the definitive way to do it. This will be a LinuxPlanet article when I work it out more completely. A nice calm one. Oh, and that silly-looking little Gnome volume control in the systray? If you right-click or double-click it actually brings up a mixer, which is a graphical front-end to alsamixer. Do Edit->Change Device when you have more than one sound card. I hate computers. Thank you, we'll be here all week!