I am having problems with sound when I want to run xmms or Mplayer. I can listen to music, and watch movies with sound when I use programs like kaboodle, and Noatun. But when I try playing music on xmms, or watching a movie on Mplayer they always tell me that

cannot open audio device dev/dsp: No such device.

I tried changing the permissions on it to 644, 777, and still no luck.

Even as root I get the same message.

One thing to note is that xmms sometimes is able to play music, but it is at odd times. Now tried it Mplayer as well has sound sometimes, and sometimes I get that error above. This is very confusing.

If it makes any difference I am trying to run both of them in KDE3. Mplayer I haven't installed the GUI, but running it from konsole, like this:

mplayer -vo x11 <movie file>

Some info that you might need:

1) I am using the csxx46 modules
2) Yes I checked lsmod and sound + csxx46 are loaded
3) Like I said above this problem only happens sometimes, and other times the two programs work.
4) I set chmod to 777 for dsp dsp1 audio audio1 mixer and mixer1

I hope someone can help me.
Thanks.

After palying around with it for a couple days now, I finally figured out what the problem was.

I noticed that Arts server was on, and decided to turn it off, and try playing music on xmms, and mplayer. Once I did that, xmms, and mplayer worked perfectly.

My problem now is that once arts is off, I can't hear the KDE system notifications, you know the sounds that come up when you minimize, or maximize windows, and so on. It isn't big problem, but I would rather have everything work

What I did was set the Autosuspend if idle option to 1 second, so this way my xmms and mplayer don't need to fight the Sound Server for access to dsp.

But is there any better way to do this? or is the only way? Basically what I am asking, is how can I have both xmms & mplayer work, and still have my Sound Server on?