Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

Although mplayer worked fine, I couldn't click on videos or music files in Nautilus because it runs gmplayer and gmplayer flashed a dialog box over and over too fast to see. I ran gmplayer on an MP3 file at the command line and got this message over and over:
[AO_ALSA] Unable to find simple control 'PCM',0.
A google of this turned up a solution:

Change Preferences/Audio driver to Pulse (from Alsa)