esd is still a decent, lightweight sound daemon and can be used for network sound just fine. To the best of my knowledge, it doesn't have any functional bugs either. Pulseaudio is *no* alternative as it's highly intrusive, breaks all kinds of stuff and is overly complex for the sole purpose of just transmitting sound over the network. One real alternative could be doing that manually via some player and netcat, but come on. I am against the removal of media-sound/esound. Reproducible: Always
The place to discuss this is gentoo-dev mailinglist where the removal was announced.
