cannot hear sound when I play multimedia files
 

cannot hear sound when I play multimedia files.
I have tried mplayer for movies and audacious for mp3s. I see them working and on mplayer I see my video, but I hear no sounds. Never had this before for a long time now. This is with Zenwalk 4.4.1. Any ideas why?

When it seeks out soundcard, I have three options. The CM -media 87XX seems to be the right one. I select that, but it still fails to play. I have looked at sound settings and even switched from mixer1 to mixer per some other fixes here. That failed also.

I reinstalled Ubuntu and pclinuxos2007test, and sound played beautifully so I know it is a configuration issue on zenwalk. Any ideas?

I have determined that it is a C-mixer card. Zen picks it up also and does not complain. I have used
alsamixer --->tested all volume aspects
alsactl store
alsaconf ---> This brings user to the option to select what their sound card should be set to

I have copied modprobe.conf file from pclinuxos partition to /etc/modprobe.conf from Zenwalk 4.4.1

SOLUTION tO PROBLEM
 

I have an external soundcard with c-media and a nforce 2 realtek onboard sound card.

With Zenwalk 3.0 up to zenwalk 4.2, I can hear sound very well. Moreover, it knows to use c-media when I select it with alsaconf

With Zenwalk 4.4.1, I cannot get it to ignore nforce 2 soundcard. It keeps on loading that. Other difference is that on zenwalk 4.2 ND BELOW, my hard drives are mounted as hda3, etc.. while on zenwalk 4.4.1, they are called out as sda3.. the kernel is 2.6.20 on zenwalk 4.4.1 instead of 2.6.18.

Is there a way I can go back to 2.6.18 so as to get my sound working with this install.

This is my fifth install attempt on one weekend just to get sound working..

EDIT: I solved the issue myself. I recall in a vectorlinux / ubuntu forum being asked to disable the second sound card from bios.

Solution: Go into Bios> Integrated peripherals> disable ac or nforce sound card.
When you now run alsaconf, you only see the proper sound cards select it and hit okay.

well done,
i would never have thought of that.