okay, so here's my dilemma, I've found out how to get a lot of my favorite games working in Linux. I've noticed in some that the sound is absolutely horrid. Enemy Territory sounds good, Quake 3 sounds good, and UT2003 sounds for the most part decent. However, in my most recent gaming endeavors, I have found that the sound for both Neverwinter Nights and MOHAA is total crap. In Neverwinter Nights You can hear the music very well, but some of the environment sounds and the characters voices sound very muffled and are mostly drowned out by the music. In MOHAA I can hear the music and the shots from my gun, However I cannot hear any of my enemies or comrades shooting, sometimes I'll hear the voice commands of the squad leader or whatever. Anyhow, my system description is below, but for those of you who don't want to look down that far, I have a Soundblaster Live 5.1, and I'm running Slackware 9.1. Is there anyway to remedy this situation, I've searched all over but can't seem to find anything of decent help. I'm thinking about trying OpenAL, but I'm not sure that it is the answer to my problems. I look forward to reading any suggestions you all might have. Thanks!

Are you running a sound daemon? aRTs and esd usually cause problems with game sounds, mostly bad latency. Just kill both before running a game see if that fixes it.