ESD

The Enlightened Sound Daemon was used by gnome to play system sounds on certain events - like login, logout, etc. It has since been replaced by "libcanberra for event sounds or GStreamer/PulseAudio for everything else."[1].

There is one built with alsa support(the normal one) and an additional built with oss support in the AUR

Starting ESD

There's not much to setup apart from adding esd to the DAEMONS line in /etc/rc.conf like this:

DAEMONS=(syslog-ng network netfs crond alsa esd mpd hal fam gdm cupsd)

Troubleshooting

-Is esd hogging your sound device and you can't uninstall it since gnome requires it to install/build?

put

esdctl off

in a startup file(like .xinitrc, or use gnome-session, kde....)

problem solved!

to see if anything is hogging your sound devices run fuser as root or sudo.

sudo fuser /dev/snd/*

and

sudo fuser /dev/sound/*

example:

kris|~$ sudo fuser /dev/sound/*
/dev/sound/mixer:     3504

Then you can use

ps auxw|grep 3504

for example, to see what is hogging the device.