Mandrake 10.1, installed ALSA, using snd-intel8x0.

according to "lspcidrake -v|fgrep AUDIO" - default is:
i810_audio : Intel Corp.|ICH2 810 Chipset AC'97 Audio Controller [MULTIMEDIA_AUDIO] (vendor:8086 device:2445 subv:103c subd:1274)

I've checked, and with /sbin/fuser -v /dev/dsp it says that nothing is currently using the card.

I am using Thunderbird 1.0. If I go into preferences and choose to Play the System New Mail Sound when new mail arrives, nothing happens. If I choose a custom .wav, it plays a couple seconds of static when new mail arrives.

Gaim plays sounds fine, and so does Kaffeine. Gaim, however, does not play sounds if I am playing anything in Kaffeine.

I am seeing the same problem in Suse 9.2. lspci | grep audio shows 0000:00:0b.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq 5880 AudioPCI (rev 02)
ditto for fuser /dev/dsp, nothing is using it at the moment. Everything else that has sound seems to work fine, games, mp3s, CD audio, etc.

It's possible that the wav file is encoded using Microsoft's ADPCM encoding.
This is what was causing a similar problem for me.

You can find out the encoding for the audio file using the 'file' command:

I fixed the problem by converting the audio file to PCM encoding.

On my system (fedora core 3) I did this using SOX, with this command:

Hope this helps!

Rached Blili