xmms and gaming

hm well how do i have to configure my system to use sound in different apps at the same time for example hearing music with xmms while playing a game? in windows it was standard but in linux only one prog can use the sound protocol... now whats to do?
ok it seems to be a simple problem but i didn't find a way to solve it yet because im quite new to linux

It's important to know some information, such as:
-What distribution
-What sound system (oss, alsa, etc...)
-KDE/GNOME/other?

Slackware 9.1 with gnome and alsa has full duplex sound working out of the box. I remember when I had Redhat 9 and KDE there were more problems.

ok SuSE 9.0 KDE 3.1 and alsa

I know of a few possible problems.

One is that you don't have the access permissions. Try running the video game/xmms as root and see if it works. (the easiest way is to log in as root, which isn't the safest, but I doubt you will have any problems). If it works as root, then you might have to change the permissions on /dev/mixer or /dev/dsp. There could be other audio /devs that I'm not thinking of.

If that isn't the problem, it could be that KDE's sounds server, arts, is running and interfering. You said you use alsa so that shouldn't be the problem, but you can make sure by checking if it's disabled.


That's all I can think of for now, those are my .

Look up dmix command for ALSA. The dmix command is only limited by your sound hardware. If your sound card can handle 32 voices/channels of sounds then thats your limit. The dmix goes in your .asoundrc file.

In Windows, it was not standard. Windows 3.1 did not have this feature. Also the programmer have to find out ways to mix sounds. I don't know about Win95. Also the sound card have to do with it. If the sound card can not handle more than one sound file, it will only work with one sound file.

Or you could try oss, which is needed for games such as UT2003

well I have tried it with OSS and it is still the same problem... I also tried it as root which did fail as well...
I have the aRTs-server running and it says it would provide the ability to use sound for different apps at the same time... but apparently it doesnt work
and when I disable aRTs I cant select a sound system like alsa and oss anymore and it doesnt solve the problem either...
I dont know what to do, it should work... my soundcard is definitely able to support it, in windows (I'm not talking about 3.1 ) it works without problems

hm could perhaps someone explain the sense of this aRTs-server-thing to me?
I recognized that Unreal Tournament and some other progs like winex-emulated games seem to have a conflict with it... when aRTs is activated there is no sound in UT, when I shut it down, everything is just fine :/
so where is the sense in running the aRTs-server? does it have any advantages? the problem is whenever I disable aRTs I cant use the sound-configuration menu of KDE anymore... help me plz

I would stick with ALSA and not use aRTS. I had problems with aRTS when I used KDE.

well the problem is that there are no configuration options available when aRTs is down... what exactly is aRTs good for? When its on I have access to all the sound options but some programs dont work with it... I dont get it

Actually I have the same problem. I am using slackware 9.1 with alsa. Whenever xmms is playing a song and I try to start quake3 or any other app/game the sound is busy by xmms. Question is how can you run both at the same time. In reverse if you run quake3 and then go to windowed and try to run xmms it says the soundcard is busy or no configured properly. Why can xmms and quake3 not access the sound device at the same time. Permissions are correct. Does it as root and normal user. There has to be a way to do this.

btw i'm using fluxbox. I don't think the desktop/wm should really matter, but it might.

If you disable aRTS, the configurations only go away for aRTS. You can still configure alsa, for example, in the command prompt with alsamixer.

Also, your soundcard has to be full-duplex, but I imagine yours are.

For XMMS check what output plugin you are using, and try different ones. That might help.

I also just got a new problem of my own, where it seems the kernel module for my soundcard stopped getting loaded. So it doesn't see my soundcard anymore... Can't seem to get it to work.

hmhh what could be the reason that for example UT doesnt work with aRTs?
what has to be configured in order to get it to work? in UT is no option to select a sound system so where can I configure it? It doesnt matter if I use OSS or ALSA with aRTs, always the same problem...

anyone?

Many sound cards can not handle multiple inputs so the module (driver) have to make virtual multiple inputs The dmix command is the one you need to add in your .asoundrc file in order to handle multiple sound requests. Including the dmix command in .asoundrc does work. Did everybody skim over my post.

ALSA also handles OSS request but Unreal Tournament can output to ALSA too. You just need change a line in the system.ini (global settings) or user.ini (client settings) for UT to use ALSA. However sound maybe slower so SDL (default setting) should be used.

XMMS has a ALSA plugin but you first need to edit your .asoundrc file in order for it to work. Other programs like Xine and mplayer can output to ALSA but they too need .asoundrc setup properly to work.

Read documentation on .asoundrc at ALSA. You will soon get it to work.