Rhythmbox segmentation faults

After recently upgrading from Dapper Drake to Hardy Heron I noticed that Rhythmbox was intermittently crashing (segmentation fault).

The problem appears to be a known bug.

Meanwhile there is a work-around which involves (re-)enabling the cover art plug-in. This worked for me.

Update 2008-06-06: unfortunately the problem persists. Let's hope the recent update (0.11.5) solves the problem.

Microphone Audio Capture Very Faint

After installing skype (via Synaptic) I found that audio captured via my microphone (plugged into the external jack) was almost inaudible on playback. Ultimately, I overcame this as follows:

1. From the command-line run alsamixer
2. Select the "Capture" channel and increase the recording levels, e.g. 75/75
3. In skype select Tools > Options... > Sound Devices > Audio System to use: ALSA
   

Flash audio problems in Firefox 2 - Solved

After upgrading to Firefox 2 I had problems with the Flash plugin no longer producing sound when another audio application was running - a problem I'd not previously had with Firefox 1.5.

The fix was fairly simple. I had libflashplayer.so in my .mozilla/plugins directory. This was being used by Firefox 2 for the application/x-shockwave-flash MIME type in preference to Shockwave Flash v9.0 (flashplugin-nonfree package).

After removing libflashplayer.so and flashplayer.xpt from my .mozilla/plugins directory audio playback works perfectly in the Flash plugin in Firefox 2.