Sound on Fedora-8: what a mess!

[Timothy Murphy]

I was listening to a CD (Yehudi Menuhin) on one F-8 laptop,
where it worked fine (using amarok),
and moved to another, apparently identical, F-8 laptop,
and got no sound at all.
I tried "killall -9 pulseaudio" and it worked perfectly.

There seem to be a vast number of sound applications
competing for use.
What exactly is the relation between pulseaudio and amarok?
I see on my KDE system I also have KDE=>Multimedia=>CD Player
but I have no idea what application this refers to.
Clicking on it does not produce any sound, in any case.

KDE=>System=>Soundcard Detection seems to me completely useless.
It either tells me that sound is working, which I already know,
or else that it is not working.
I cannot see what function this program could possibly serve,
unless one has more than one soundcard,
which surely is extremely rare.

RealPlayer, mplayer, helix, amarok, KsCD, KMix -
is there any end to this ...