Hey,
This is an annoying little problem: if I'm listening to a playlist, and gaim needs to make a sound (user log on, message received, etc), it will wait until xmms is finished a song then make all the sounds that it has been waiting to make which then stops xmms saying that the sound card is busy.

Is there a way I can get gaim to just try and if it doesn't get through, then it gives up? Or is there a way to configure my soundcard for multiple sounds (ie, gaim sounds play over xmms)? Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.

Which sound system are you using. Also if you're using a desktop environment it helps listing them. For alsa there's a howto in the alsawiki called AlsaSharing. It's in there. I think the easiest way was with a sound sever from a desktop environment.

using the oss sound driver?

Hmm. Upgrade to ALSA I don't know for OSS but it's seems to be getting outdated.

and iirc, doens't support multiple sounds at one time.

1) open xmms --->preferences--->Audio I/o plugins---->Output plugins ---> Check if u have Esound output plugin [libesdout.so] and select it..

2)restart xmms


3) go to gaim --->tools-->preferences---->Sounds {See if esound shows up} ---> select it ---> goto
Sound events and select all the sound events u wanna turn on ---> highlight one of the events and
click on test... it should work even when u are listening to a song on XMMS [ ie. with esound output plugin selected]


4) if the above step fails

go to gaim --->tools-->preferences---->Sounds --->select Command --> in the text box "type" --->esdplay %s ---> goto Sound events and select all the sound events u wanna turn on ---> highlight one of the events and click on test... it should work even when u are listening to a song on XMMS [ ie. with esound output plugin selected]

Yep it does. In my earlier post I mentioned the ALSAwiki about AlsaSharing. It's in there

using kde is much like UsualTuxpect's post if you're using arts as the sound server (which allows sound mixing and uses OSS). set up xmms to use arts and set up gaim to use arts in the programs' preferences. I'm a bit behind in the gaim version, but using version 0.75, there is arts support built in. you may have to recompile gaim for arts support in later versions though.

Thanks UsualTuxpect! That worked fine.

darkleaf, can you post the link to this alsawiki or the alsasharing thing, I'd like to look into this. Thanks.

Don't you have google?

http://alsa.opensrc.org/
http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=AlsaSharing

Sorry, I meant to edit that last post cause I did find it...however, I'm not sure which of the cases that it explains I fall into and how to find out. The cases are:

* The card supports hardware mixing.
* The card does not support hardware mixing, but all processes accessing it run applications that use the ALSA library.
* The applications use a sound server to access the card.
* The applications use the OSS API to access the card.

Anyone know how I can find out? I thought it was the first one because my computer is only a year old. Perhaps I'm wrong, any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

The sound server is for example the ones that are in KDE and Gnome.
Hardware mixing seems to be on every new card so you migth want to try googling on your card to see if it is. (Maybe check the HCL here on linuxquestions)

I don't know the others but from your posts I think one of these might be true already so you don't have to searchany further