xmms error: alsa_setup_mixer(): Failed to find mixer element: PCM

So here's a way to not spend an hour troubleshooting a problem:
LOOK AT THE F'ING PREFERENCES MENU!!

Sorry to be yelling, but man, do I hate my own stupidity. I had installed the xmms-wma plugin and wanted to test the playability of WMA files in Linux. Since this is my new Dell server with a new Creative Labs AudigyLS card and a fresh build of FC6, x86-64, I hadn't used the xmms install on the system yet. So when I started xmms, I noticed that I got the following error:
alsa_setup_mixer(): Failed to find mixer element: PCM

Oooh. That's not nice. So, it my typical fashion, I googled the error:

And found that a lot of people had a similar issue. And the more I looked at the entries, the more the people seemed to be having pretty cryptic difficulties. Oh, this might be a bad one. I assumed the worst.

So back and forth I went. Looking at the google results, trying to find the correct ALSA device name and hand entering it into xmms's config file. I got confused at the lsmod and modprobe.conf output and entered the wrong sound device name. I repeated this process multiple times.

Finally, after the end of an hour, I remembered that there was a Preferences menu within xmms! So I started up xmms and saw the original error, but xmms still allowed me to go into the menus. In Preferences, I found the following "Audio I/O Plugins" menu:


Under the "Audio I/O Plugins" menu, I found a Configure button specifically related to the ALSA sound output on my box. I clicked it:


Therein, I saw that the "Mixer Device" was indeed set to PCM. Well, look at that neat little arrow thingy next to PCM. Why, it's a pull-down menu showing me more choices! And look at that! There is a choice for the Audigy's "Analog Front" slider! Gee! Can I really select that? Why, of course! >:[

You'd never know that I've spent the last twenty years working with computers. And the final kick in the nuts was that even though I have the xmms-wma plugin installed, the WMAs didn't even play after I got xmms working properly! I received this error:
[root@localhost dell]# xmms ../beck1.wma
*** stack smashing detected ***: /usr/libexec/xmms terminated
Aborted

I'm too tired to resolve this issue tonight. But in sum, outside of my own stupidity..if you have a Creative Labs Audigy installed in your Fedora box and see the above error, do yourself a favor and use the Preferences->Audio I/O Plugins->Configure->Mixer Device to change PCM to Analog Front.

Good Night!
the stupid mule

ps - this is what I get for staying up until 3:30am the previous evening

Cinelerra compile problem solved, more or less..

To follow up on this thread from a few weeks back, through a fair bit of reading and educated(?) guessing, I was able to get around this problem that stymied me.

One of the guys on the Cinelerra boards did clue me into the fact that the aclocal.m4 file was much too short, as it should be a superset of /usr/share/aclocal/libtool.m4. So that gave me a start. After reading a bit of doc and problem postings in Google regarding aclocal.m4, I saw that the file listing of hvirtual/m4 was about half as long as the list of *.m4 files in /usr/share/aclocal. So, I edited autogen.sh to point aclocal to build aclocal.m4 from the files in /usr/share/aclocal, rather than using the m4 directory under hvirtual. After running autogen, I then had a complete aclocal.m4 file with a libtool section. I did not have the libtool section in the file before building from /usr/share/aclocal.

I don't know what side effects this has, but the CVS compiled and I can playback and render video from my saved projects, so I assume this is a valid solution. The only side effect I've noticed so far is that I get a few more ALSA underruns like this:
AudioALSA::write_buffer underrun

ps - here's some doc I found that may help someone in a similar predicament:
re automake:
http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/automake/automake.html#SEC_Top
re libtool:
http://people.debian.org/~keybuk/libtool-updating.html