I have no idea what I'm doing. I know next to nothing about LinuxMCE and making any custom changes is extremely confusing. I wish I could spend more time learning, but these days I don't have a lot of free time.
So, with that said, I guess editing /usr/pluto/templates/asound.conf was a mistake because after the MD booted up, /etc/asound.conf on the MD hadn't changed at all. Just great.
I then looked on the core in /usr/pluto/diskless/29/usr/pluto/templates, and found the MD's asound.conf. It has some macros in it for automagically finding the card number. Can I put the lines I mentioned before straight into this file? Also, I don't see the "default" line. Can I manually put that in here too, or will something else come along and add another default line?