GMplayer and ESD

[NiBe]

I've just emerged mplayer, with it's GTK frontend, and set it up to use gl2 as its video output and esd (esound) as audio output.
My trouble is with the audio. When running mplayer as "mplayer -vo gl2 -ao esd /path/file" things work fine. When i start gmplayer -> Right click -> Open -> Play file things work fine. When i create a playlist and play from that, things go to hell.
The trouble is that the sound isn't synced to the video, the audio is ahead with a seeminlgy random amount of time, sometimes as much as a second, and I haven't a clue why.

Does anyone know what's messed up here?

Using ALSAs mixer is out of the question, since it wants to emerge me a new kernel (from the 2.4-series what's worse) and then complains that ALSA is build into my current kernel. Unless there's a way around this...

[NiBe]

After messing about, my sound support is now completely screwed.
I removed ALSA from my current kernel and let portage attempt to fix things for me. After that, /dev/mixer, /dev/pcm etc. is gone, so of course every single app refuses to play sounds.

I've tried recompiling my kernel, but the dev-files refuse to reappear.
Now I'm planning to reinstall the system. After a few other mistakes I've done I might as well do that.

Is there any way of compiling apps with ALSA-support via portage _without_ having to install alsa-driver & alsa-lib and having it try to patch my kernel. My kernel config is fine as it is (with its' built in ALSA-drivers), all I want is a mixer! Arts is out of the question since I want a system clean from QT/KDE-apps.

It's either this, or fixing gmplayer/esound so they play nice with each other.