Will XtremeGamer sound card work with Audacity

[waxcylinder]

What to use for playback? I do not like Windows Media Player

It depends on what you want. Foobar2000 is pretty lightweight but supports virtually all known audio formats. It also has basic library features, very good format conversion and CD ripping.
For something that looks prettier and has really good "visualizations", comprehensive plug-in support, also supports video formats, comprehensive library features and can access "GraceNotes" for automatic id3 tagging, you could try WinAmp.
Both programs are available free. There is also a paid version of WinAmp that has a couple of enhanced features over the free version, but the free version is still very capable.

I'd like to add VLC. And it's available for all the 3 major platforms featured here (Windows, MacOS-X and Linux).

And I would add iTunes as player to consider (available free for both PC and MAC).

I know a lot of folk regard this as "bloat-ware" but it does a good job as an Audio jukebox on my PCs (But I do also use iPods so iTunes synching is important to me). One other useful job that iTunes does for me is to enable me to easily print CD covers (artwork and tracklists) for the recordings that I burn to CD.

WC

[steve]

iTunes as player

One of my pet-hates. Along with WMP it's the "Jabber the Hut" of the music software world.

[bgravato]

I think that any media player that doesn't play flac or ogg vorbis out-of-the-box should be shot to death

I used iTunes (as well as Safari) when I first bought my macbookpro nearly 3 years ago... iTunes was a bit too much "overkill" then but it was still usable (and Safari was fast). Then a lot of upgrades came and with them a lot of new eye-catching features... It totally killed it's usability (same for Safari). I long ago switched to VLC as my favourite audio player app on mac (beautifully simple and fast and supports a lot more formats out-of-the-box). I put Safari to the corner some time ago too in favour of the much simpler and faster chrome.