I just went through and installed alsa drivers so that I could listen to mp3's while playing rtcw. But rtcw STILL hangs at a black screen until the current song on xmms is done then finally starts playing. Anyone know what I need to do to fix this thing?

oh and it's an ensoniq 1370 sound card. When I was running windows xp I had could listen to mp3's and play rtcw all the time. Rtcw on Happy Penguin can get boring as hell without some good tunes...

I don't know if it's possible to play mp3s and play at the same time, if there is a solution, i'd like to know about it, but as far as i know, only one process can access the soundcard at a time, i think windows handles this differently than alsa, but i'm not too sure.

also, doesn't rtcw need direct access to the soundcard to work nicely? in that case i don't think it's possible to play mp3's at all, but i could be wrong, if so, please correct me.

AFAIK, only one process can access the soundcard. It's like when i'm just listening to mp3 and i want to put a movie, mplayer even start because it hangs when tries to access the soundcard.
So, playing RTCW and listening to mp3 could not be possible. Anyway, RTCW is a great game indeed

Is that just the case on the old ensoniq card? Curious, because I am running alsa 1.04 on slack 9.1 and kde, and (once I discovered I had to turn off arts to play RTCW) now I can play the game while listening to music files or streams on XMMS no problem. I have an audigy card...

really??? I will give it a try....never heard two proceses can access the same device at the same time....

I have tryed right now, and RTCW is not starting, i have to kill it with the console. I have an SiS 7012, maybe it's that my soundcard cannot handle two streams at the same time.

I have an SB Live I have no problems playing ET with and xmms at the same time either ALSA 1.0.3 here.

I still cant play both at the same time. When I had windows using the same sound card, I had no problem doing this.

Linux and alsa don't have a problem with it, but some sound cards can only do one at a time. You may want to check the permissions on your sound device. Its been a while, but I remember having to "chmod a+rw /dev/dsp*" in order to make it possible. I think the number of dsp devices (dsp0, dsp1, etc) depends on your hardware.

one other thing, i discovered most of what i know about this in the process of getting Teamspeak up and running for Americas Army SF, there are some good how-to pages out there about that, because for obvious reasons TS uses at least 3 parts of your sound device at once. Game sound, teamspeak sound, and the mic in as well. I havent tried running TS with RTCW though, maybe i will sometime soon and give you an update.

i can only play 1 stream at a time on my cmedia 8738 onboard, and i could do 2 of them just fine in windows. i dont mind it much, but it seems like this thread is a good place to ask about it. if you want to know, i have a dsp0, dsp1, dsp2, and dsp3, and i have tried that chmod that philo suggested to no effect. any suggestions?

Im not an expert, but those /dev/dsp0, dsp1, etc, do they mean how many different audio devices you have?
For example, i have my soundcard on /dev/dsp0, but the mic of my webcam is on /dev/dsp1 (Logitech QuickCam Zoom). According to that, and using my deductions (that sometimes are quite bad), each number of dsp is a different audio device. Am i right? If not, what's the meaning of having so many dsp?

The following is from the TS forums, regarding Quake3 and RTCW

contributed by: - pwk.linuxfan - Thanks.

This is for those of you that are having problems running the game while TS is running (like getting no sound in game, or the game refuses to start). It focuses on how to get the game working with alsa, most recent distro use it, as it seems to be TheBest(TM) sound architecture for Linux.

1. Are you using alsa ?
First thing to do is check if you are running alsa at all. Try "lsmod | grep snd" in a terminal as root, if you get some lines of output, you are using alsa, if you dont get anything, you are not.

2. Any sound demons running ?
Now we check if /dev/dsp is being used by any evil sound-demon (like arts or that gnome sound thingy (esd) :] ). For this you need the programme "lsof", if you dont have it installed you can get it from your distribution cd's. Now issue "lsof | grep dsp" (while not running anything that plays sound, like mp3 players, teamspeak, games etc.). This will list all aplications using the sound, idealy you shouldn't get any ouput (go to 4.) else we need to get rid of that demon.

3. Getting rid of the sound demon
If you got output in (2) then you most probably have arts running (if you are using kde) If something else is listed as programme name (first column) you have to get rid of that. (like esd)
a) disabling arts: Go to the KDE control center, hit search and type "artsd" this should find a hit "Sound-System". In the dialogue you deselect start arts at kde startup. Then you restart kde and check if arts is still running (2). It should be gone.
b) disabling other demons: You can always resort to killing the processes ("killall thedemon", but the better way is to find where you can set it to not start it.

4. Finding the process name of your game
For the following steps we need to know what the process is called that runs the game. To find out, you can start your game and switch to a ttySx [press Ctrl+Alt+F2 for example], then type "top", and you should see the name somewhere high up (as your game should use lots of CPU ) ). For quake3 the name is "quake3.x86".

5. Telling alsa your game only needs playback, no recording etc.
Now, to enable your game to play sound you have to tell alsa that your game will not need to record sound or anything - else alsa will refuse to give your game the capability to play sounds, since TeamSpeak already has the rights to record, and no two programme should be able to. Issue these commands as root:
echo "quake3.x86 0 0 direct" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss
echo "quake3.x86 0 0 disable" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0c/oss
(substite "quake3.x86" with the name you found for your specific game in (4)). Now you should be able to play your game with sounds while using TS.

6. Making the changes permanent (over reboot)
Since the /proc filesystem is not permanent [nothing gets saved if you reboot] you have to issue the commands in (5) every time you rebooted and want to game with TS. The sollution is to put those commands in a startup script, which will issue them automagicly at boot-up time. For SuSE its /etc/init.d/boot.local, for gentoo try /etc/conf.d/local.start. Just add those commands somewhere at the bottom of those files.

7. Have fun
You made it !

What if the user didn't compile alsa as a module? I know I didn't, but (i think) i'm still using it. Maybe you should edit the part that says if you get no ouput from lsmod | grep snd your not running alsa, so it's not so final.

Is there a way to check if your running alsa if you compiled it directly into the kernel?

well, i did that lsof of my system, and it turns out theres nothing running, despite the fact that i had xmms playing music at the same time. very odd... i tried the instructions too, no go. any suggestions? im not running any sound servers, i uninstalled them.

hmmm, not sure how i can help beyond this, my problems were only involving the arts server, but when i saw that post on the quake3world forums i thought it might be helpful.

I think when it comes to installing alsa, you are best off to go to the alsa site and follow their instructions, because as far as I know, if you have alsa working properly with its emulation of oss, the permissions on the devices are correct, and your sound card is capable of doing more than one thing at once (anything reasonably new should do it, and i think it is technically called duplex) there should be no reason why you cant play a game and listen to music.

good luck