How do I allow my sound to be used across several applications instead of one at a time? I have ESD disabled, and I am using ALSA. My hardware is Intel HD Advance Audio, and the code is snd_hda_intel with the required OSS emulation.

It doesn't support full duplex? If so thats what you need to enable. If you use kde you need to enable it for artsd. arts can be kind of a pain in the butt

Sadly I don't have KDE, and other threads about enabling full duplex is with ethtool (for ethernet?) and ARTSD. I have gnome and gentoo. How about that?

Are you absolutely sure you are using ALSA directly and not OSS-emulation? Very rarely does software automatically use ALSA. If you are using ALSA, which ALSA device are you using? default? hw:0,0?

Some sound cards don't support hardware mixing (playing multiple streams at the same time through hardware). My USB sound devices are like that. For those rare cases, you need to use a dmix device (software mixing) in ALSA.

Unfortunately, that usually boils down to putting some cryptic statements into /etc/asound.conf. If possible, it should be avoided.

Uh.. crap I forgot about this: Anyways... I am using /dev/dsp which is soft linked to /dev/sound/dsp. And I do have OSS emulation enabled in my kernel.