As much as i'm hating trying to get all these mixer setting straight, I didn't at all like the kernel drivers for my sblive. they made my sblive sound like a cheap (cheap, not inexpensive) card, maybe because I wasn't using a mixer that could handle them. on the other hand, I very much liked the oss package I bought; I'm only trying to do alsa because I want to be on the speakfreely reflector. as for your trplayer program, there is probably a setting eluding you or something; even with the problems i am having with my mixer settings for recording, trplayer works fine with my .wav files. However, I will say that for my soundblaster the kernel support was just fine; I couldn't have been happier, so it depends on your card whether you would be happywith the kernel support.
