After adding a PCI soundcard to my machine for the purposes of having a gameport my Kubuntu 7.04 install wasn’t always choosing to use the on-board Intel chip for sound meaning I could near nothing. The solution seems to be the following
sudo asoundconf list
Names of available sound cards:
au8830
Intelsudo asoundconf set-default-card Intel
sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart
* Shutting down ALSA… [ OK ]
* Setting up ALSA … [ OK ]
You’ll also need to restart any apps to get sound, there is no need to reboot to get Amarok working 
EDIT – For Kubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) I again had the problem of no sound from Amarok. Sound from flash, kde etc was all okay, there is a dialogue however now within KDE / Amarok that fixed this without issue, I had to set “Playback/recording through the PulseAudio server” by moving it to the top of the list.
Thank you!
does not work on kubuntu 10.04
No, things seem to have changed a bit, you’d need to use sudo aplay -l to list the cards now if memory serves