simultaneous sounds

[wreckd]

i have this little problem. an annoyance really. i cannot seem to get more than one program to use the soundcard at once. for example if xmms is in use and a mail comes in and kmail tries to play the "new mail" sound...it doesn't play. not only does it not play, it queues up until xmms stops then all the queued sounds play one after the other after the other....it seems like they should be able to overlap, right?

system:
debian testing/unstable
ensoniq pci sound card
i'm not running any sound server's that i'm aware of just the normal device drivers...no alsa or oss, afaik, is running.

any ideas on this?

[Craig McPherson]

That's how it works.

You can use a mixer daemon, like esound (esd), to play sound from multiple sources at once. Actually, it's only esd that has control of the sound card: all the other programs playing sounds simply send the sounds to esd which mixes them.

All the sound programs you want to use have to be written to use ESD, though. And many aren't.

[Malakin]

kde uses aRts which does the same thing as esound but it's apparently better. XMMS has aRts support as an output plugin, simply switching it over may make everything work. Multimedia stuff in general seems to work a lot better for me in kde 2.2