I've installed Debian sarge on my G4 powerbook recently. I doubt the architecture is relevant to this, but I figured it couldn't hurt.

Anyways, I let the installer configure sound. Sound works, for one application or the other. The two I've been using specifically to discover and play with this problem are gaim and xmms.

xmms plays sound correctly when I set it to use default output. It does not play correctly when I tell it to use ESD/ESound Daemon (using the plugin installed by apt). Gaim plays sound when set to Automatic, but neither the ESD setting nor the Command: esdplay %s settings actually result in sound for me. But they don't both make sound at the same time when both set to automatic because both apps just snag control of the sound output file. I know that is because they're not using the software mixer. ESD is installed, but it seems no programs can use it. I tested it by just finding a .wav and feeding it to esdplay, with no results. esd is running.

i know the hardware's fine since some sound plays, so it's esd's settings or how the apps are using it that's messed up. any suggestions?

neither a google search nor some wandering around esd's site showed anything that would pertain to my problem that i could find.