I'm trying to setup my headset so I can chat on Steam, the mic works but it can only be used by one device at a time. It's a USB headset, the mic works when I test it on Steam but once I'm in the game I get I can't use it. At first I didn't know what to think of till I accidentally tried to arecord while I had Steam "Test Microphone" which gave a device or resources are busy. Same message when setting up Alsa with no dmix. I've read the alsa wiki's and looked around but none really give a clear way of setting up dmix+dsnoop or asym, can someone explain to me how exactly to setup ALSA?

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very, very tricky.
no i cannot explain. for me alsa works, but i don't use neither steam nor headset.

my guess is that you will need pulseaudio for this to work.

if it really must be plain alsa, i suggest you ask on the alsa-user mailinglist.

what distro are you running?