I have come quite far in my quest for audio in Linux and I hope that perhaps my journey is nearing an end.
After a solid week of trawling through Linux forums of some form or another I have come here to post my unique problem.

Firstly my Setup:

MOBO: Gigabyte GA-VRX
onboard sound chip: Via VT8233A Ac97

I run 'Yoper' Linux and it has ALSA built into.
All that is required is that you 'unlock' it and modify
your modules.conf file to contain the lines pertinent to your
particular sound hardware.

My problem is that I can get standard CD's (ie non mp3) to play quite happily with XMMS, but I cannot get mp3's, wavs, ogg or even cda files on the hard drive to play.

So it would seem that programs such as XMMS can access
the sound chip but not the hard drive. plausible?

Also here is my modules.conf file:

alias usb-controller usb-uhci
alias usb-controller1 ehci-hcd
# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-via8223A
# module options should go here
options parm: index int array (min = 1, max = 8), description "Index value for VIA 82xx bridge."
options parm: id string array (min = 1, max = 8), description "ID string for VIA 82xx bridge."
options parm: enable int array (min = 1, max = 8), description "Enable audio part of VIA 82xx bridge."
options parm: mpu_port long array (min = 1, max = 8), description "MPU-401 port."
options parm: ac97_clock long array (min = 1, max = 8), description "AC'97 codec clock (default 48000Hz)."

# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0

# card #1
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss



I would greatly appreciate any help.

This is probably a silly question, but have you checked all your mixer settings? If you use KDE, try kmix, or maybe aumix. See if the CD level is up, and all others are down. If so, raise all the other sliders.

A reply!! wahooo.

I have played extensively with the mixer settings and they seem fine.
I should really say now that I have another thread on the homepage of my distro 'Yoper' but because of the rule here that you cant include a URL unless you've posted 5 messages, it wasnt included in the first message.
I started a thread here because the Yoper forum doesnt get much traffic and I have spent the last week basically posting replies to myself as I figured things out.
If you were interested in seeing that forum you could google 'yoper' to get the homepage. My thread is in the free support forum under the same user name 'CrazyHorse'.
That thread gives a good background to my problem.

Anyway thanks for replying and I hope you (or anyone else)
has some more options for me to try.

Ta.