Firefox steals alsa audio

[Danny Yee]

suvayu ali wrote:
> Those apps might come with certain desktop environments, but they can
> also be installed separately. Also most of them are graphical
> frontends to command line counterparts. So you can try the command
> line utilities if you wish. I for example use XFCE and WindowMaker and
> use alsa-utils and pulseaudio-utils packages to get the command line
> utilities.
 
That's reassuring. I'm always afraid the desktops will take over to
the exclusion of simpler systems.

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=225660
I've followed the instructions in that web page.  That is, I removed
pulseaudio, rebooted, reinstalled pulseaudio and associated packages,
and rebooted again.  And I've run gst-mixer and alsamixer and set all
the volume sliders I can find to maximum.  padevchooser, however,
does nothing when run from the command line -- no window appears,
and the application just hangs, doing nothing, until interrupted.

vlc is set to use pulseaudio as output, and pavucontrol shows it
playing.  But nothing is to be heard.  amarok does the same thing --
it appears to be playing, and is reported by pavucontrol to be playing,
but no sound can be heard.  Youtube in Firefox works fine (and doesn't
get reported in pavucontrol) but quitting Firefox doesn't help --
still no sound from vlc or amarok.

So it looks like pulseaudio is sending its audio stream to the wrong
place, but how can I fix that without padevchooser?  I've checked
that avahi-daemon is running, having read
	http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=6990830

Danny.