After using alsa very happily for several days or weeks, it no longer works for me. Changes I have noticed between the daily builds of 10/1 and 10/13 indicate that Ubuntu is working on alsa, and making changes.
In the past, with my program, here's what happened.
When sound didn't work, winecfg usually showed wave-in as "default." When it did, it showed as "dsnoop:0." Well, for a few days daily builds had been hell and sound didn't work at all. Then suddenly with today's daily build sound worked great -- once, with the wave-in showing "default." ??? Then the second time I logged in, it showed dsnoop and the message said the sound system wasn't being recognized.