I heard that half the point of even upgrading to alsa was because alsa is suposed to let you play multiple sounds at the same time, but I have alsa installed and even when I run 2 alsa using apps at the same time, the first app to start will play sound and the second wont.

is there any special configuration to be dont to make alsa allow you to have multiple programs play sound? I already have OSS emulation working.

It depends on your hardware. I have an asus a7n8x deluxe with the integrated SoundStorm audio that simply will not play sound from multiple apps regardless of my choice of driver. This is nvidias fault for not releasing complete drivers or the specs for the open source community to write their own. Then, I own an iBook that has the same problem. However, my Audigy works just fine. I thought it was just me, but there is a lot of the same info out there on the Soundstorm problem, and all the iBook Gentoo users I have spoken with can only get sound from one app at a time.

It seems like there should be some workaround for this, but I haven't discovered it. I would love to hear it!

It would help if you listed your sound card model though

Well there are two schools of thought on this.

One is to use a soundserver like esd, arts or jack. I've heard terrible things about arts and esd being somewhat (but not a lot) better. Jack is meant to be the best but the least supported. All but jack can use either OSS or ALSA. Jack just uses ALSA.

The other method is to use ALSA's dmix plugin. It's already part of ALSA so you don't have to go compile anything new. You do however need to set it up. Some good instructions are at the ALSA Wiki. I've managed to get this working but only for ALSA-aware apps. If an app uses OSS then I can't get it to work simultaneously with any other sound producing app. Apparently others have succeeded where I have failed.

Scruff, apparently SoundStorm uses the intel-8x0 driver. Try that.

I have adz, but thanks. I did a review on the a7n8x in the HCL that lists all the specifics including what I did to get it mostly working. Sound was the only shortfall. It gave me an excuse the get an Audigy though which I really wanted in the first place

I might give Jack a try on my iBook though.

dang, I have a Biostar M7NCD-pro, which is also a NFORCE chipset, but it doesnt have good soundstorm, it just uses a generic audio output that works with the intel-8x0 driver.

You should still be able to get the dmix plugin working.

Ditto. Remember that this is software mixing so it doesn't matter whether your card supports it or not. In fact, the sound server idea would probably still work too.