check if you have libasound2 devel stuff

Well I have the ALSA lib devel stuff, which is apparently the same as libasound2 from what I can tell. I've compiled plenty of programs that use ALSA, in any case.

SDL_sound is used for audiotracks in cdrom games. So it shouldn't affect the general sound.
We use SDL for that. As far as I know we haven't changed our interface with SDL in ages.
asound/alsa is used for midi
Does dosbox tell you anything if you start it from a terminal ?

The messages at the terminal aren't particularly enlightening. I just noticed, however, that sound does work in DOSBox 0.7x, but it's significantly quieter than in version 0.65, i.e. much quieter than it should be. My sound card mixer settings are normal.

in older version of dosbox sbpro was the default
now it is sb16 . maybe that is a difference ?
you can use the mixer command inside dosbox to beef up the sound levels.

Aha, the mixer command. I guess I should have read the readme file more thoroughly haha. Running "mixer master 10000:10000" seems to work nicely. It seems a little odd setting the mixer level so high but it works... Actually the sound quality seems better now than with DOSBox 0.65 for some reason. Thanks a lot. Now if only I could get MIDI working on my computer (not a DOSBox-related problem).

are you sure that the ingame soundlevels are correct ?
10000:10000 is huge. at my place i have no need to set the mixer volume at all.
maybe run alsamixer (in a terminal) to check your sound levels for all your devices

Well I did have the volume turned down some in the game. I turned it all the way up and then 10000:10000 was indeed far too much and it sounded like it was clipping quite a bit. I have it set to back at 100:100 now and it sounds fine. I'm guessing that I had backed the volume off because it was so loud in DOSBox 0.65. Even 10000:10000 in DOSBox 0.72 didn't bring the volume up to the level that it had been in 0.65. Now that I compare version 0.65 to 0.72, the sound in 0.65 is ridiculously loud and very distorted. So I guess I was actually having a problem with the sound in version 0.65 and turned the game volume levels down to compensate for it somewhat. In any case, everything is working properly now.