Hardware / software sound mixing woes

[bigfam]

Okay...here are my troubles.
I cannot get hardware of software mixing to work. I have both an onboard nforce3 sound card and also a cheap cmi8738 pci sound card that i picked up today. I can get both cards to play no problem

according to here http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/index.php?vendor=vendor-C-Media#matrix this cmi8738
I've searched the forums, google, went over a alsa docs etc, tried all different sorts of /etc/asound.conf and ~/.asoundrc.

i was able to get a bunch of instances of this working no problem