Hi,

When I open alsa mixer it has 'conexant CX8811' showing instead of 'usb audio' and no way of changing it.

Sound plays fine from everything, but I don't know how to make it play as 5.1; that's not quite the issue I have with it. My mic doesn't seem to work.

I can't try and 'record' anything either with gnome sound recorder because it says "Could not get/set settings from/on resource."

Audacity says "Error while opening sound device. Please check the input device settings and the project sample rate."

The way I assume I know it doesn't work is that on ventrilo it wont light up.

Everything works perfect in windows.

So, if I understood correctly you have a TV card with built-in sound chip and an additional USB sound card, right?
Do you see the USB sound card when you issue the command "lsusb" or "lsusb -v"?
Then, have a look at this documentation - it's for my Linux distribution but the principles remain the same.
Third, you can have as in your case multiple sound cards installed and you access them through alsamixer with the "-c X" parameter, where the X is the sound card number, starting from 0 included, onwards. Therefore, if you have only one soundcard in your system you access it through "alsamixer -c 0" and so on.
Does this help?