I downloaded the game StepMania and ran it. The game had no sound, so I exited and was planning on fixing that. However, once StepMania closed, there was no sound at all from my system. I tried running various music players, and none of them worked. I also tried using fluxbox instead of KDE (based on information from the StepMania site FAQ), but still nothing worked. Restarting the computer didn't help anything. I even booted into Windows, just to make sure that the sound card and speakers work, and the sound in Windows was fine.

I assume that since the sound was working fine before running StepMania, and broken after, that it has something to do with the game. There is probably just some setting that it changed that needs to be changed back, but I don't know what it is.

In case it helps, this is what StepMania tells me when I start to run it:

StepMania 3.9
Log starting 2006-03-24 24:43:29
Loading window: gtk
OS: Linux ver 020615
Crash backtrace component: x86 custom backtrace
Crash lookup component: dladdr
Crash demangle component: cxa_demangle
Runtime library: glibc 2.3.6
Threads library: NPTL 2.3.6
TLS is available
ALSA: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.10rc3 (Mon Nov 07 13:30:21 2005 UTC).
ALSA Driver: 0: NVidia CK804 [CK804], device 0: Intel ICH [NVidia CK804], 1/1 subdevices avail
ALSA Driver: 0: NVidia CK804 [CK804], device 2: Intel ICH - IEC958 [NVidia CK804 - IEC958], 1/1 subdevices avail
Couldn't load driver ALSA: Not enough substreams for hardware mixing, using software mixing
ALSA: Software mixing at 48000hz
Sound driver: ALSA-sw

(stepmania:10411): Pango-WARNING **: Invalid UTF-8 string passed to pango_layout_set_text()

Perhaps you problem is that sound device is busy. From my own experience - if I launched FallOut 2 only, it's worked with sound, but if i launch it with XMMS simultaneously - no sound from game

Try to run "alsaconf" after quiting StepMania

It isn't because the sound device is busy. I don't even get sound when I try to play music in pure command line.

alsaconf tells me that there is "No supported PnP or PCI card found." I do have an onboard "nVidia Corporation CK804 AC'97 Audio Controller (rev a2)" (which lspci tells me).

Could it be drivers that somehow aren't installed now or something?

I got it to work.

It may or may not have had something to do with Stepmania. What happened was somehow some things became muted in alsamixer. When I unmuted them, sound worked once again! Now I am very happy. ^_^