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I have a M-Audio audiophile 2496 sound-card in my computer which worked fine in my Microsoft days, but ever since I'm on Ubuntu I was not able to get it to work. After lots and lots of reading and trying fixes i finally managed to get it to work! The main problem was that this card has 10 channels and Pulseaudio (Your sound server in Ubuntu) can only handle 2 channels. The solution was not that difficult at all. Below you will find the necessary steps you can take to get yours to work properly. 

First of all to get your card to work, you need to navigate to the "system" menu, go into "preferences" and then into "Sound". Be sure to Disable other sound cards and enable the M-audio card which sound be labelled "ICE1712 [Envy24..." . Then you also need to select profile. Mine was "Multi-Channel Output Active (Digital Disabled)". 

Now open a terminal and enter following command: 

alsamixer

Press the "F6" key and select the M Audio card. You should see all volumelevels from S/PDIF to Multi Track. Patch S/PDIF, S/PDIF1, H/W and H/W1 to PCM Out using the arrow keys. Left/Right is used to change to another channel and up/Down is used for changing the selected channel. 

Also check if all volumelevels are around 80% or more! 

Now open the pulseaudio config file for edit: 

gksudo gedit /usr/share/alsa/cards/ICE1712.conf

And edit the part for your front channel. Change it to look like this:

ICE1712.pcm.front.0 {
	@args [ CARD ]
	@args.CARD {
		type string
	}
	type route
	ttable.0.0 1
	ttable.1.1 1
	slave.pcm {
		type hw
		card $CARD
	}
	slave.format S32_LE
	slave.channels 10
}

The card should work without any problems, if not, it's possible that your system needs a restart first. And if it's still not working after restart, then I would advise you to check the Ubuntu forums and probably Launchpad too! Check the resource links below: 

1. Launchpad: Pulseaudio fails to initialize ICE1712 chipsets 
2. Ubuntu thread about the card