Have you looked at the troubleshooting tips here?
http://www.ros.org/wiki/sound_play/Troubleshooting

Have you managed to play sounds using aplay, the alsa sound player?

On Fri, 2010-04-23 at 11:54 +0200, piero.cosi@pd.istc.cnr.it wrote:
> I rosmake sound_play (a package in stacks)
> after having installed all the needed dependent packages
> 
> I started sound_play (roslaunch sound_play soundplay_node.launch)
> as indicated in the README file 
> (I checked also that my sound board was working! FESTIVAL is OK!)
> and
> I started test.py (rosrun sound_play test.py)
> and i got no sound and the folloqing error!
> 
> _____________
> [ERROR] 1272015262.911962: sound_play.libsoundplay.stopall is deprecated, use stopAll
> instead.
> This script will run continuously until you hit CTRL+C, testing various sound_node sound
> types.
> 
> Try to play wave files that do not exist.
> say
> wave (assumes you have some xemacs21 sounds present)
> wave2 (assumes you have some xemacs21 sounds present)
> plugging
> unplugging
> plugging badly
> unplugging badly
> New API start voice
> New API wave
> New API builtin
> .................
> _____________
> 
> 
> 
> PERHAPS.... COULD SOMEBODY GIVE ME SOME HINTS ON HOW TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM???
> 
> 
> MANY THANKS in advance
> Piero
> 
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