The instruction to add users to group audio in /etc/group is noted in the Handbook, section 11, but it should also be mentioned in the ALSA guide, where administrators are most likely to look to find everything they'd need to know to configure ALSA. If an admin wants to set up ALSA, he's not likely to also reread the entire Handbook just on the off chance that there's a crucial tidbit that he might have overlooked before on first install when he wasn't concerned about sound... This comes up recently because an upgrade to either the kernel (2.6.12), PAM or udev means that the adding users to the audio group is now required, where previously it didn't do any good (see, for example, the forum link above). (Changing the docs won't help admins who suddenly see "breakage" because of technically incorrect configs, of course...)
Valid point, there's another alsa-guide update coming up, will fix this along with that.
Thanks for the info, I added an "Audio Group" section to the alsa-guide. Changes are in CVS, will reflect online in a bit.
