I need some help in fixing some strange sound behaviour in Slackware 10.

Firstly, sound is working only for a single app at a time (no mixing as far as I understand).
For example, I can listen mp3 with XMMS, but at the same time there will be no sound in realplayer or Xine or anywhere else. Moreover, concurrent sound application will probably hang.

Secondly, but possible not a bug but feature (though, strange one): changing volume in one app causes global volume update - if I try to boost volume in realplayer (that is just loaded and plays no media), my XMMS starts working louder and KMix shows change in PCM output.

What info should I provide to help you help me?
I have nforce2. Sound configured (as I thought successfully) with alsaconf.
My alsa package is version 1.0.5.
Full duplex is on, quality is 16bits.

There are no such problems with my hardware in windows.

Thanks.

Did you check to see wether alsa supports your soundcard, not as in supporting it, it's working, but as in supporting it with Hardware mixing.

AFAIK, only EMU10K1 and some EMU10K2 cards, and the turtle beach santa cruz have Hardware Mixing. So you could try using dmix, this will enable hardware mixing via software, it'll decrease your performance somewhat, probably not noticeble.

I have the exact same problem on my M2N-SLI Deluxe, it won't let me play music and game sound at the same. But, i've stopped caring.

Anways, try using dmix!

well, thank you very much. By googling some of the words from your post I came upon http://alsa.opensrc.org/Hardware_mix...oftware_mixing and it was useful.
Still, I have problems with xmms, but that seems to be a separate issue for anything else works fine (e.g. mixed audio from several xine instances, or xine & mplayer).
Probably, I'll try to update xmms and get it using alsa instead of oss.