I am having some problems with my sound in Slackware 10. There was no problem configuring ALSA and the sounds play perfectly. The problems is that it only plays one sound at a time. If 50 people tell me something while I listen to a song, I have to listen to the sound when someone sends me a message 50 times in a row before the next song starts. Nedless to say it is slightly annoying. I have searched the forums here, but I haven't found anything that helped me. Is there a sollution to this?

whebn you say sends you a message.. are we talking about kopete ? (the kde messenger)

kopete uses ARTS, music programs usually use ALSA.
you can only use one at a time.

ALSA is direct acess, only one program at a time, ARTS is a server running on top of alsa that allows mutiple sounds to play at once...

try setting your media player whatever it is to use ARTS output instead of alsa.

also, make sure your sound card supports multiple audio channels ?

many crappy on board sound cards do not.

gee, some hardware info my be helpful here. The answer is probably simple, in that I'd guess your sound hardware has no inbuilt (hardware) mixer, so it can't mix to input streams into one output stream. If there's no hardware, it just can't be done.

easiest way around this is to run "esd" the e-sound daemon, which is a software audio mixer. set things like xmms to use the esd output driver instead of native or alsa, and you should now be able to play multiple sounds from multiple sources at the same time.

I haven't a clue what you mean by "people telling me something" though...

EDIT: Above poster beat me to it. ARTS and esd will do essentially the same thing. arts looks a bit more complicated, though I've never used it...

I have no idea what the soundcards exact name is. ALSA recogizes it as a onboard nForce 3 card which is probably right though. And I am using Beep Media Player, and I have chosen esound as the output. The problem is that BMP is the only app where I can chose the output. And whenever I am trying to start a game it says that Directsound is not found. May have something to do with Wine rather than the sound though?

ok, now we're into a totally different kettle of fish. You won't have directsound, because that's part of the windows DirectX 3D package (windows version of OpenGL). You won't ever get this! Maybe wine can do it, but I haven't a clue and I wouldn't count on it.

xmms will allow you to output to esd too. Make sure you have esd installed and running. "esd &" in a terminal should be sufficient. then fire up two songs in bmp and xmms and see if they overlay.

n.b. when esd starts up, you should here a series of rising beeps. you can disable these with the "-nobeeps" option, but they're handy to hear the first time to know things are working correctly.

I figured Directsound wouldn't work, but that is not the main problem. Even if I get BMP and XMMS to play to songs at the same time I still wont get GAIM and other programs to use esound, right?

they should. try it and see! I've never used gaim so I haven't a clue what it's about. but mozilla happily mixes with xmms on my machine under esd, and they refuse to play together without it. I think mozilla access /dev/dsp directly, and that it's intercepted, or something like that. I've never probed it too much in the past, since it "just worked".

I started esound (got no beeps though) and installed XMMS. I chose esound as output for both XMMS and BMP, but XMMS complains that the soundcard is blocked. Same problem the other way around aswell.

probably because something is trying to send stuff onto the sound card. first indication is that there's no beeps (there should be if it's accessing the soundcard correctly). close all the apps that might access the card, and restart esd. maybe even set up esd to start at boot time and restart...

root@david:/home/david# esd &
[1] 7552
esd: Esound sound daemon already running or stale UNIX socket
/tmp/.esd/socket
This socket already exists indicating esd is already running.
Exiting...

I got this when I tried starting it as root, so I guess it is already started? Can it be that I have too many outputs running at the same time? (I can choose esound, oss, alsa and arts as outputs in XMMS).

I have the same problem, and the same distro, and its solved

just choose esound in xmms and in all your other sound programs (gaim, xine, ect) and it should all work fine