Sound can't mulitask
 

If I'm listening to an Mp3 on Totem the Gaim sounds don't play. When i exit totem i all the Gaim sounds play in succession, which is very annoying and can take up to five minutes to finish. How can i make my sound driver multitask?

You've gotta use ALSA buddy. I'm using Knoppix 3.4 hdd install, and it's too customized to really get it to work, but with Arch Linux (very similar to Slackware), it was a cake with their wiki. yes, ALSA is def. for sound multitasking.

Ehhh? Did I see a "clue bat emoticon" in this forum?

To the best of my knowledge, playing mp3s on XMMS, accompanied by soundevents generated by ESD (or, whatever the Gnome uses) or aRts (KDE) ALWAYS results in backlog of sounds being spit out at end. It has nothing to with ALSA, unfortunately. Unfortunately because easy software-based mixing is not built into the ALSA yet. They have this dmix thing though.

The best suggestion is to stick to software that uses same soundsystem output. In your case, switch to ESD (Gnome) based mp3 player. (That is assuming GAIM used ESD too, someone?) Sounds will be mixed in ESD and not delayed.

thanks