No worries, Ben, there's a learning curve to Unix-like systems, and on top of that each has its own unique attributes.
"Device Busy" tells me that /dev/audio is currently "in-use" by an application: gstreamer, or xfce4-mixer, or another link in the chain of sound tools.
You can find out what is using it with fstat(1) and stop that application, but I think it may be easier to just get your audio problems resolved from a console, when XFCE is not running.
You can "log" console activity in a file using script(1), just make sure to use col(1) to strip control characters (like backspace) from the resulting
typescript output file before later edit/copy/paste. For example:
Code:
$ script
Script started, output file is typescript
$ audioctl -f /dev/audio
.
. (output)
.
$ exit
Script done, output file is typescript
$ col -b < typescript > my.clean.file