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09:56
@ukBaz: Making some progress; see updates to Q&A :) I tried using mpg321 -g 50 NightTunisia.mp3 to play a song. I got no errors, but got no sound either :(
10:26
Excellent news!

How do you select which output (card) the audio is going to?

Does this help? https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Examples#Set_the_default_output_sink

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