XINE was unable to initialize any audio drivers

From Helpful

This article/section is a stub — probably a pile of half-sorted notes and assertions some of which may well be wrong, and not verified as a whole. Feel free to add or refine.

Diagnosing

The first test to do is probably checking whether you can get sound at all, when not using xine.

You probably want to check specifically with the underlying interface that xine is using (and with another, if available). For example, use mplayer with -ao oss and/or -ao alsa.

A fairly likely problem is user permissions (and/or user-specific configuration). Do the checks as the user that the player is using (your user login), and possibly also as root, to see whether there's a difference.

If there is, see if there's a system group called audio. When there is, it's used to control what users may use the audio device, and you need to be part of it. There's usually a GUI way of adding you to it. The command line way is gpasswd -a me sound

(verify):

Otherwise, when using ALSA, you may want to look at its configuration (/etc/asound.conf, ~/.asoundrc).

(verify):

In some cases, the device may be locked, or only one application can access it at a time (almost a fact on OSS, except with emu10k cards and a few others).

(verify):

When the problem is specifically with amarok (and with nothing else using the underling audio interface), there may be some amarok configuration problem. Edit edit (or delete) ~/.kde/share/config/amarokrc and see whether that solves it. Alternatively, use the helix engine (realplayer) instead (or phonon, when that's available already).