Sound configuration for Enlightenment 17

[Eric McCorkle]

Hello,

I am working on a FreeBSD setup on a Lenovo W540 Mobile workstation. 
The sound devices seem to be detected just fine (the nvidia-X11 driver 
doesn't seem to work, but that's another issue).  I'm having some issues 
with the sound system that seem to originate from userland.

I'm running Enlightenment 17 as the window manager.  It does not seem to 
detect the sound card at all (its volume control shows no devices).

Firefox, on the other hand (currently configured to use pulseaudio), 
seems to have its sound work just fine, or at least the flash plugin 
does (I can watch youtube videos with sound just fine).

I tried playing around with pulseaudio, jack, alsalib, and friends a 
while back.  It seems that alsalib is failing to detect the sound card 
for some reason.  I'm not that familiar with the lower-level sound 
architecture, so I'm not sure what the problem could be (it might be 
something very simple).  Can anyone give me pointers on where to start?

Ideally, I'd like to set up some kind of system-wide sound process, but 
that's a purely optional goal (jack seems to be able to do this, but not 
all applications can use it; pulseaudio seems to lose a number of 
capabilities when configured this way).  Has anyone done something 
similar, and if so, what were your experiences?

Thanks,
Eric