I am not dead, just playing around with my old new powerpc toy
I am not dead either but now that I finally have CinGG built and working on the latest Fedora 44, I can not get Alsa or any audio to work. I installed alsa-utils and alsa-firmware. But I still have online resources to check for help.
Oh ... I dare to guess this might be due to alsa -> pipewire (or alsa - > pulseaudio > pipewire ) routing somewhat broken?
Thankfully that snapshot of -current Slackware I installed had no problems in this area at least.
Good luck with troubleshooting, hopefully it just something simple, like config file installed into wrong place.