Ok, heres the problem. When I try to play an mp3 or wma I get no sound, I have all the mixers turned all the way up and enabled end everything. the weired part is that when I go to a website with sound (homestarrunner.com), that sound works. why does sound from the internet work fine but other files dont. if it helps I am copying the files from my NTFS partition to my ext3 partition, dont know if that affects anything. Thanks ahead of time.

What distro are you running? Can you play a *.wav file?
good luck.

im running slackware 10.0 and no I cant play .wav files. I have no Idea what the problem could be.

Who is the owner of the files? How about permissions? When you copy them over are you root, or user? Can you play an audio cd?
good luck.

I copied the files from my ntfs partition to my ext3 partition as root and then tried to play them as root and I get no sound. I can play audio cd's and I am in the process of ripping a cd to see if I can play those files. According the properties of the file, root is the owner and I changed the permissions so anyone can read or write to the file and it still doesn't work. as long as I can play files I rip I guess I will survive, although this thing is taking for ever to rip the cd! thanks.

update: the files I copied wont play either. I copied them as ogg files. I can only play from a cd or the internet

Have you tried ripping or copying files as your user instead of root?