esdplay only plays about half way through an .au file before stopping. The play command works just fine and plays the sound right through. Try the Linus sample that sndconfig comes with. Sound card is a ISA Soundblaster AWE64. Otherwise sound works fine and other sound apps have no problem. This is probably not architecture related but I could only test on Alpha.
Fixed in 0.2.19 (apologies to the other reporter of this problem who I misdiagnosed the problem for).