All I want is to be able to play more than one sound at once.


If that explains my problem, read no further, but if not, I will elaborate...


I'm kind of at a loss as to how the sound system works.

Here is my problem:
When I listen to music with yammi, it works great! Only thing is, I don't hear any of my gaim alerts.... until I stop the music. Then I hear ALL of the alerts since I started playing music. Imagine, I start some music, wander off for 12 hours, and come back and stop the music, and then have to listen to 10 minutes of "BLING... BLING... BLING... BLING... BLING... BLING... DINGDONG... BLING... BLING........"

Furthermore, I use some KDE apps such as kate, and whenever they want to make an error sound, I get a popup saying "the sound server could not be initialized, output to /dev/dsp has been disabled."

And this is the best: If I run xine while yammi is open (even if yammi is stopped!), all sound output goes to a .WAV file in my home directory. Once I inadvertently left the menu of Pi running for a few hours.... I had an extraordinarily large WAV file full of extremely awesome (though repetitive) d&b.... :P It probably would have filled my HD if I hadn't noticed.

Can someone help me!? Here is pretty much everything I know:

1) ALSA, OSS, TOSS, and ESD. These all do something. The same thing, I think. Yammi uses ALSA; I think gaim does, too. I know what they all stand for. w00t!
2) arts. This does something else. It's something to do with KDE. I don't use KDE, I use fluxbox, so I don't know anything about it.
3) /dev/dsp. This is my sound device. It is a symlink to /dev/sound/dsp.

OK, this exhausts my knowledge. For the love of god, how do I make it so I can play more than one sound at once?


And about my system:
- Slackware 10.0
- Kernel 2.6.8.1
- Fluxbox (no KDM/GDM/XDM, just X)
- Creative SBLive! 5.1 sound card