Alsa -- Unable to open slave

[rosenbat]

Hi-- I am new to Gentoo (moving from ubuntu) -- and while I generally like the distribution, I'm really struggling to get sound to work properly.
I'm at the point where I have alsa running on my system without pulseaudio. I am running a 64 bit distribution.
Sound works in kde just fine, but when I run a non-kde app (ie vlc or a browser) I get the following error:
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:1018:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave

I searched the forums (and google) and there seem to be a number of people who have gotten this error. In terms of concrete things I could get from those posts--I tried making a .asoundrc file and putting this in it:

[dE_logics]

Are you in the audio group?
_________________
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[rosenbat]

Yes I am.
Also -- I tried setting the permissions of /dev/snd to 777 and that did not solve the issue either.

[rosenbat]

In the end what solved the issue was including this in the .asoundrc file -- it was thinking the default device was 0, but its actually 1.