I have an audigy LS, I installed alsa and it was working fine, dmixing worked, I had not problems. now it just stopped working. I have no idea what. lsmod shows the drivers are loaded but they are unused, esd shows this:
ALSA lib confmisc.c:558snd_determine_driver) could not open control for card 0
ALSA lib conf.c:2691snd_config_hooks_call) function snd_config_hook_load_for_all_cards returned error: No such device
ALSA lib pcm.c:2017snd_pcm_open_conf) Invalid type for PCM default definition (id: default, value: cards.pcm.default)

and if I try to run alsamixer it shows this:

alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such device

nevermind I have fixed it. Had to run .snddevices for some reason. I don't know why, but it works now.