I had the same difficulty. No sound cards were available according to

aplay --list-devices

I found somewhere (I forget where) the suggestion to add to

/boot/config.txt 

the line:

dtparam=audio=on

and from then everything went swimmingly. I set up some (possibly pretty dangerous) values in

/etc/security/limits.conf

like this:

### realtime permission for audio
@audio   –  rtprio     99
@audio   –  memlock    unlimited
@audio   –  nice      -10
@audio   -  priority   8
# End of file

The audio priority of 8 seems to be necessary to stop annoying messages in the puredata console when it's started. I'm not an expert on these values, they might not be wise, safe or ideal but they worked for me.

And I made sure that my user is in the audio group:

usermod -a -G audio david

And I've had glitch free performance since out of the mini jack.