I'm having an issue with my sound card. I like to talk to my friends on Skype via voice and things while I'm playing games and stuff, but I've noticed something. Even on a different PC with a different distro of Linux, I ran into this issue. Linux sound drivers seem to be capable of fewer channels or something. Like in Windows, I can talk to a friend via voice on Skype and play WoW or Half Life or something with no issues, but in Linux, if I try to do this, the sound is disabled in the game I try playing. I can't play music in the background while I'm playing WoW or anything. I can only have one application accessing my sound card at one time. Is there a way I can change this so I can possibly talk to someone on Skype and play WoW at the same time? This limitation makes trying to use TeamSpeak or Ventrilo in Linux pointless.

Woks fine for me using only ALSA and its DMIX plugin(for the multi sound streams):
http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DmixPlugin

I have actually found the exact opposite. My Asus mobo has a built in VIA sound driver and I find it works better in Linux with Alsa than it does in Windows.

More channels, and I can have multiple players running at once, and all of them will output. This leads to a real cacaphony, of course, but it DOES work. Windows specifically does NOT do this.

You might try playing with the sound driver that you are using. I have found the later versions of Alsa to be simply outstanding.