alsa cant work with two program at once.

when i'm playing mp3 with xmms i cant lauch mplayer or any media player program. it will stuck at there until i stop xmms from playing any songs.

how to fix this?
i'm sure that alsa support this right?
OSS support parrallel playing.

Mixing multiple audio sources depends on the sound card driver. Apparently the alsa driver for your soundcard either doesn't allow it, or only allows it for programs using the alsa library to play. If the OSS driver for your card works for you, either go back to it, or make sure you're using the alsa output plugin for xmms, the alsa -ao driver for mplayer, etc.

i've gone into alsa-driver-1.0.3 and looked through the FAQ file and found out this

Q: When I play something and I try to play something other the second attempt
will not fail but instead it hangs waiting for the completion of the first
sound.
A: This is definitely the standard behaviour as described in many official
documents that now ALSA follows. There is no reasons to complain about that
for the following reasons:
- it's the right (standard) way
- the application that want a different behaviour can open the device in
O_NONBLOCK mode
- all modern OSS drivers in mainstream kernel (cmpci, es1370, es1371,
esssolo1, maestro, sonicvibes, vwsnd) works in the same ways and the
others have to be intended buggy
- we want you ask to broken applications author to fix them ;-)

so it said it is a normal standard way of the device.
is there any way to get around this?

this is just the way sound is handled by many linux drivers

gui's like kde and gnome have tried to create a sound server (like the standard sound server in windows) that will soak in all sound calls and relay them to the driver as one sound (ie aRts in kde and esd in gnome); unfortunately, all applications must have a specific driver for aRts in order for this to work correctly, and still this often fails

the only way to get around this is to find a sound card that has a driver that will allow for multiple sound automatically; most good sound cards allow this (off the top of my head, the audigy cards work best for this)

then why do my soundcard does work with 2 or more stream of sound at the same time?
i can play winamp and play dvds at the same time.

i also play need for speed and plays winamp at the same time also.

is it because of the driver or alsa limitation?

i assume you mean in windows that you can play more than 1 sound at once

in short, yes, it is a limitation with the way sound drivers are made in linux for certain cards (in reality, some cards can really only play 1 sound at once; and like i said before, the sound server tries to mix that all into one sound; in windows, there is a standard way of doing this but it is just one problem in linux)

however, cards like the audigy's can play more than 1 sound at once on the hardware level

that means that i cant do anything else but to get myself used to this limitation unless i can edit the driver myself.

ok thanx for a great explaination.