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Application using sound, blocks access to soundcard for other applications??

Hi,
I recently installed Debian on my laptop... Everything is working OK :)
One problem is that my soundcard can only be used by one application at a time, example: i'm playing music in xmms, i can't hear the Gaim sounds, or: i'm playing a movie in MPlayer, when i want to start xmms, xmms says that the soundcard is in use.

The soundcard in my laptop is a nForce onboard sound and i'm using ALSA...

Can anybody help me with this problem or knows any solution, how all the programs can access the soundcard?

Greetz, Erik

Either use the Alsa dmix plugin or use a dedicated sound server. Both essentially do the same: They mix audio streams from different programs to one single stream which is sent to the sound card. Sound servers include esound (Enlightenment, Gnome) and arts (KDE).

This is what I use in my ~/.asoundrc on my laptop with nforce3 audio to make ALSA mix it down for me without a sound server:

Code:

 

pcm.!default {

  type plug

  slave.pcm "dmixer"

}

pcm.dsp0 {

  type plug

  slave.pcm "dmixer"

}

pcm.dmixer {

  type dmix

  ipc_key 1024

 slave {

  pcm "hw:0,0"

  period_time 0

  period_size 1024

 buffer_size 8192

  rate 44100

  }

 bindings {

  0 0

  1 1

  }

}



ctl.dmixer {

  type hw

  card 0

}

Håkan