Audacity, F9, and sound systems

[Andrew Robinson]

I want to start ripping my LP's, so I installed audacity on my Fedora 9 
box that I already use for MythTV. When I fire up audacity, it offers a 
number of choices for the input sound and playback sound. Most of those 
choices seem to revolve around ALSA. The only ones that seem to work are 
OSS. OK, I'll use what works. However, once I have run audacity once and 
exited, the next time I get into it, there are only ALSA choices 
available for playback. OSS is no longer available in the drop down and 
none of the ALSA choices give me sound. Anyone have any idea of what is 
going on here?

 From what I have read, I thought OSS was being deprecated in favour of 
ALSA. And then I thought the new pulse audio system in F9 and F10 was 
supposed to supplant ALSA. I am guessing I lack a basic understanding of 
how the audio systems work on Fedora 9 and how to configure and control 
them. Can someone explain this, or even better, point to a document that 
does.

Thanks!

Andrew Robinson