Hey Guys:
It seems that xmms cannot play music when ESD is enabled. Xmms gives an error message, saying that the soundcard is busy and the user should make sure no other applications are blocking the soundcard.

If I turn off ESD, xmms can work properly. Is that a bug of ESD? What should I do if I want to have system sounds (System->Preference->Sound->"Sounds" tab) and at the same time being able to listen to music through XMMS?

FYI, this is the configuration of my laptop: Lenovo IBM T61, Debian with kernel 2.6.22-3-amd64.

Ok welcome to the XMMS club. Most people don't use XMMS any more. They have amarok and rhythmbox and so on. I like XMMS because even though it has not migrated to GTK2 ,it simply rocks. You can use fuser to find out if a process is using /dev/dsp or not. If some process is using /dev/dsp, that is your culprit.

Tks, rch. I tried fuser and pinned down the process using the soundcard was exactly esd. So I've still at a loss about how to tackle this problem.

Since XMMS uses GTK1 and lot of things have changed in Gnome, the ESD plugin may have issues with the current version of ESD. I suggest that you use Alsa or PulseAudio(http://pulseaudio.org/). That said, I believe that your issue could be fixed. Try googling for more help.

I think I've solved the problem by following relevant threads under the tag "esd". In addition, it helps to specify the right driver for xmms as well as mplayer. They should be both set to ESD.