OK, I am stumped. I am using an ESS 1938 PCI card. Alsa is happy, using mpg321 from the console works fine, but in KDE or GNOME I get no sound at all.

If I try to adjust the volume in GNOME it instantly snaps back to 0. The weird thing about all this is that if I go into DESKTOP PREFERENCES > SOUND > SOUND EVENTS and play a sound it works perfectly, however XMMS and TOTEM wont play a lick of sound.

If I go to APPLICATIONS > MULTIMEDIA > VOLUME CONTROL or do gnome-volume-control from the console I get an error box that says "Sorry, no mixer elements and/or devices found"

I have the gnome-audio package installed just fine.

It's basically the same in KDE.

Any ideas?

nevermind, running alsaconf as root fixed it all.