Hi there folks, total and utter newbie here with a problem with his external sound card!

Never used anything apart from Windows until now. Trying to give Ubuntu a fair crack at winning me over. Still getting my head around Ubuntu so you'll have to be patient with me and really spell everything out in simple terms

If I can't get this card to work, chances are I'm going back to Windows...which would be a shame. So this is your chance to convert someone to Ubuntu!

Anyway, I've got a Sound Blaster Live! external USB sound card, model SB0490. It is recognised by Ubuntu, in that in Preferences>Sound I see entries for the card with OSS and ALSA.

I found a thread on here that mentioned the same model of card - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=759147 (I'd post there but it won't let me...?)

Anyway, here's the output of
* aplay -l
* arecord -l
* ~/.pulse/default.pa
* output of pulseaudio when you run it from a terminal.

like the guy in that thread mentioned:

aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 0: STAC92xx Analog [STAC92xx Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: External [SB Live! 24-bit External], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
jonathan@jonathan-laptop:~$ arecord -l
**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 0: STAC92xx Analog [STAC92xx Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: External [SB Live! 24-bit External], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
jonathan@jonathan-laptop:~$ ~/.pulse/default.pa
bash: /home/jonathan/.pulse/default.pa: Permission denied
jonathan@jonathan-laptop:~$ pulseaudio
W: ltdl-bind-now.c: Failed to find original dlopen loader.
E: pid.c: Daemon already running.
E: main.c: pa_pid_file_create() failed.

Many thanks in advance.
Jonny