Hey all,
I've been running all my mp3's from totem for the past couple of weeks, but I have the following problem: while it's playing, other programs, like gaim, can't make the sounds they're supposed to. I know that totem CAN allow this if it's working properly, because it happened once (which is weird in itself). Essentially I want one of two solutions:

I) Some way to fix totem (or whatever is causing the bug) so that it will allow for concurrent sounds to play, or
II) An alternate music/media player that won't give this problem. I've been thinking about getting amarok, but I don't know if this is the best choice or not.

Any help will be much appreciated.

Steve

Try configuring Totem to use the alsa sound system.

Thanks for the suggestion reddazz,
Unfortunately I haven't the faintest idea how to do that.
Some instructions of what commands to try would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,

Steve

Unfortunately I am stuck on a machine using KDE, so I can't give you an accurate answer. Start Totem and I am sure there is a preferences menu somewhere. Change the sound system/server to alsa in the xine audio preferences.

hmmm, I have checked the preferences menu and the audio only gives the option of Stereo, 4.1 Surround, 5.1 Surround, and AC3Passthrough. Clearly this is not any kind of xine audio preferences menu. None of the other tabs are anything remotely helpful either. Clearly the way to set up totem to play through ALSA is not here.
Any other suggestions are very much welcome,

Steve

As far as I know Totem is just a back-end for the xine engine. You might want to try changing xine to ALSA and see what happens. For that you have to change the "experience level" in the "gui"-part of the preferences to "advanced" first and than go to the audio section. Than go to "audio driver to use" and select "alsa"

good luck

Thanks for the suggestion mandavi, but I can't seem to find any kind of "experience level" option anywhere. Maybe this isn't available on the version i'm running? I just checked and I'm running version 0.99.9 with xine-lib version 1.0.0 If you have any guesses as to why I can't find these options, please let me know. As always, all suggestions are appreciated.

Steve

Try this. It will work if your xine uses the gstreamer backend anyway.
run
You will get some dialogs. Try changing the output input in audio to alsa. You need the dmix plugin installed By the way. So if this doesn't work it might be using the xine backend so u would have to confidure xine or configure dmix for alsa properly.

look in your home directory /home/your-user-name/ for a '.' file i.e. - .totem or .xine, the config file is there. look for the default snd device.