The card seems to be working fine. I can't get anything to play through the enlightened sound daemon though. I am now using the dmix plugin for alsa, but esd wasn't working before I put that in either. I have esd trying to use -d default which is where the dmix plugin picks it up. The rest of my audio setup with alsa and alsa-oss all works fine. Just can't get esd to work, and I want it for gnome sounds and such.

it probably doesn't have anything to with the sound card. it's probably between esd and alsa. maybe your esd doesn't have alsa support?

My esd should have alsa support. I am running gentoo, and I've had alsa and esd in my USE flags since the system was built. How can I check if my esd does have alsa support, just to be sure?

I can not tell what details to post as very little is given to me in the way of error messages.

Here is my /ets/esd/esd.conf

[esd]
auto_spawn=1
spawn_options=-terminate -nobeeps -as 2 -d default
spawn_wait_ms=100


I set up my /etc/asound.conf and the esd.conf according to this info I found:
http://mrhammy2.ath.cx:81/forum/viewtopic.php?t=31

The settings it reccomends are working out great for me except for esd support. I have an another very similar gentoo box, with basically the same USE flags (with alsa and esd), except it has a VT82C686 AC97 Audio Controller. Has the same alsa settings in the kernel (except for type of card obviously), and everything is working fine (including esd) on that machine.

That's why I am kinda convinced this must be related to the type of sound card I am using. I can see no differences between the 2 systems in their sound setup except for the type of sound card used.

Just let me know if there is any more info you want that I could provide.

you need the snd-es18xx module loaded properly (type modprobe snd-es18xx)

All the alsa modules are loaded fine, I am using snd-es18xx. I don't think the alsa modules are the problem since all other sound plays fine. XMMS alsa output and mplayer alsa output are both working fine. I have firefox and flash working with aoss. esd is my only issue, but like I said the same sound setup is working fine on my other system which uses a different soundcard.

The only alsa solution I can think of is to perhaps use some sort of spcecific options when I load the alsa modules. But I would have no idea what kind of options.