Ive got a soundblaster live 5.1 soundcard and all mp3's sound kind of grainy i dont really listen to cd's so i couldnt tell you if they sound any better. i thin ive always had this probelm but recently i reinstalled redhat 9. ( i am frequently reformatting my harddrive for various reasons.) but this time it sounds worse it could just be in my head but could anyone shed soem light on this?

MP3 is lossy and many of the MP3s distrubted on the net
are of horrible quality and sound grainy no matter what.
Try and find a CD that you know what it sounds like and
listen to it. See if its your MP3 quality. Try swapping out
your speakers and see if the problem gets any better.
Try out another player. If you use noatn try xmms or
something else.

I have a SBLive Platinum and I've found it likes
larger buffer sizes. I set buffers for artsd to be
small once and everything that used artsd would
sound horrible. if you're running kde it might be the
same problem. You can set the options in the control
panel.

I guess i should have mentioned that they sound fine on windows, and im using xmms. could it be the driver redhat provided for my soundcard isnt very good?

Sometimes the OSS drivers are just plain crap. You can either set the software volume down a little (to about 80-90%) and upping the volume on your speakers or get the alsa drivers from www.alsa-project.org.