In need of a sound daemon
 

I have several processes capabile of playing music or simply that can gain access to the sound card (most important: mpg321, mplayer, XMMS). Neither of these knows the concept of "sharing resources" and they grab the sound lines all to themselves.

I would need a program (a server or "daemon") that gets a hold of the sound lines at boot and distribuites them to a range of preselected processes and also provides audio mix. I wonder if there actually is such a thing for Linux

Windows DOES have a built-in sound mixer, although there are no process priorities involved. I'd be happy with that too... Is Linux inferior?

Generally, I would like to be able to play music from both the X and text mode and to also be able to play a game or watch a movie and allow other processes access to the sound card.

esd (esound), arts and I think Jack can do this. I use arts.

jack is more for audio developers (?), its great, but most of its features arnt that needed for a simple desktop, so i didn't use it, in fear it might soak up 2 much resources.

anyways, i use esd. esd is used in gnome (altho, like a lot of other programs used in gnome, its not gnome specific, in fact, i don't think there is any GUI code in esd), arts is used in kde (i don't know if it requires kde tho)

both esd and arts are suitable for a desktop.

To clarify, arts doesn't need kde :)

according to the "beyond linux from scratch" book..........

in order to install Arts......Qt needs to be installed first

and in order to install KDElibs..........Arts needs to be installed

so it all works together in one way or another..........:)

You can share sound using basic Alsa - it's not hard. All my apps use Alsa, and share quite happily.

Was gonna say "I use arts and don't have KDE installed..."

...then I remembered that I installed KDE just incase something should need it :)