Hi,
I have been having a problem with my sound latly. Sometimes it will work fine, and other times, ususally when it's switching a song or something (xmms) it will hang and then come up with a message when I try to play saying ALSA can't use the audio device. While this is happening, if I go to /dev/dsp and try to write to it, (like cat /dev/urandom to it) it will say the device or resource is busy, however I do not have anything playing at the time, not that it should matter. Sometimes it will free up and start working again on it's own (or I do something and don't know it), but other times, I have to restart Xorg and it will work again. This gets very annoying. Also, when playing sound, it doesn't seem to want to play two different things at once... eg, I cant have xmms playing songs, and still hear the "dings" and stuff from Gaim. This may have something to do with it. On my other computer, I am able to have simultanious streams of sound, eg, having Gaim still play it's sounds while music is playing, or whatever, but not on here. It should be able to do it, the laptop is a HP DV4305US, and only a few months old. I have tried looking in ps output, and lsof to see what is using dsp, however, I cannot find anything using it. If anybody has any suggestions, I would much appriciate it.

Thanks,
Oxagast

I don't really understand the details of the situation, but this is one reason for sound servers like esd or arts.

I believe it is possible to configure ALSA for multiple sources without a sound server. Check out the configurations given in

http://wiki.splitbrain.org/alsa

which also talks about setting up arts.