I'm having a problem like this. I can't get any sound, anywhere.
Here's the rundown.
* Up until last Sunday I had two PCI sound cards and one built-in.
* The built-in is disabled in BIOS.
* The cards are M-Audio Audiophile 2496 and Creative SB Audigy LS (using a CA0106 chipset).
* Until Sunday I used the M-Audio card in FreeBSD 7.2 with OSS from ports (because the ordinary envy24 driver would hang my computer when switching between audio using software), while I use the Creative card in Windows for gaming (dual boot).
* So this Monday I did a portupgrade -a, after going through the UPDATING file.
* After the portupgrade, OSS started detecting both my audio cards, which it had not done before.
* My computer started hanging when starting KDE (4.3.1), right when the log in sound should start playing.
* osstest did work outside of KDE, though.
* I saw nothing of note in the X.org log (highest verbosity -- I think), it just cut short.
* I did have CPUTYPE and OPTIMIZED_CFLAGS defined in make.conf, so I commented them out and rebuilt everything I had upgraded since last time, just in case, which took another day and a half. This did not help.
* I tried downgrading the audio/oss port to the version before which I knew worked. This did not help either.
* I removed the Creative card, which did not change anything.
* Finally, when I tried using only the Creative card, my PC stopped hanging. But now I get no sound, on any sound output.
Currently, osstest is reporting that the Audigy LS sound card is working perfectly, and I am seeing no errors of any kind, anywhere. mplayer plays audio, but I hear nothing. KDE loads without hanging, and everything says that I should be hearing sounds, but I do not. When I raise the physical speaker volume knob to max (which is very, very loud), I hear a faint "boom" followed by a very faint noise when something should produce a sound. And sound still works in Windows (without having to change anything).
Oh. Yesterday I actually got it to work in FreeBSD for one whole session, without changing anything in particular. (Actually, I did deinstall and reinstall a few times, but that doesn't work now.) It stopped working after I rebooted the computer.
This is all so inconsistent. What in the world can produce this behavior? What options do I have to try to find out more about possible errors?
In the meanwhile, I'll try portupgrade -Rf audio/oss again...