Comment 7 for bug 875660

It's not exactly a good solution, but I've been patching knotify for a while now to use libcanberra instead. It's been working pretty well for me!

See the canberra branch here:
http://colin.guthr.ie/git/kdebase-runtime/

It's pretty old now but should apply cleanly still if you want to try it out.

The whole default device thing shouldn't really matter under KDE (provided you run start-pulseaudio-kde after restarting PA to reload the module-device-manager module) this is run automatically at startup and in future releases will be baked into PA itself so will be deprecated.... that's a good few months away tho'.