KMix is a pretty decent mixer application, but it's defaults are annoying. By default, it sets all of your volume controls to zero. And if you have them adjusted from another program, it resets it to zero when you start KDE. I've disabled that now, but it took me a bit to figure out why the hold music for the gun store wasn't working. Last week, I set up our hold music to play off of Saturn. I stole/modified a shell script that runs through a directory randomly playing mp3s with mpg123. It works great, except when you install KDE and it starts turning the volume down. It's fixed now, but I hate it when it's something that simple, but takes forever to figure out.