Programs blocking sound
 

I was wondering how to make it so once I am playing music it isnt blocking the sound card for everything else (for example I would like to listen to music and play games with sound effects) I am using fedora core 3 with KDE, any help is very much appreciated, sorry if this is a dumb question!

edit: also any tips on getting a mic to work would be greatly appreciated (particularly for Teamspeak)

Use a sound server, like kde's artsd. Then set your music program to use artsd, or if it can't, run the music prog with artsdsp which will force it to use artsd.

If you using sound devices directly, it SHOULD block second program using sound device. That is standard way of using sound in Unix/Linux.
So thats why GNOME and KDE has sound daemons (esd and artsd) that mix sound streams to one device. But your applications need to use that sound daemon, or else they will block on sound device to.

Whith new ALSA sound drivers it's possible to mix sound streams in that system with a configuration file (~/.asound.rc, see ALSA web page). That is usefull, but not that easy.

You should use the new ALSA-drivers and not the old OSS-drivers in kernel. OSS is obsoleted in 2.6 kernel.

I tried using artsd by just trying to start xmms like this "artsd xmms" but that didnt work gave me this:
unix_connect: can't connect to server (unix:/tmp/mcop-cpk/localhost_localdomain-10b8-42856cda)
can't register Arts::MidiManager
There are already artsd objects registered, looking if they are active...

Error: Can't add object reference (probably artsd is already running).
If you are sure it is not already running, remove the relevant files:

/tmp/mcop-cpk/Arts_SoundServerV2
/tmp/mcop-cpk/Arts_SoundServer
/tmp/mcop-cpk/Arts_SimpleSoundServer
/tmp/mcop-cpk/Arts_PlayObjectFactory
/tmp/mcop-cpk/Arts_AudioManager
then when i kill artsd and try the command again nothing happens...

also I tried using the alsa asoundrc thing with the dmixer but my sound is still being blocked, and unfortunately I am a bit of a noob so I am not too sure on how to update everything for alsa =\

Try to tell KDE to start artsd. But the messages you have from starting artsd tells me you might have one running already. You prob need to tell xmms to use artsd as output.

It's a deamon program, not an command. It should be started in background. So try

artsd&

instead. That should work, but it's better to tell KDE to start it.

You should prob. not try dmix in ALSA to begin with. Most programs have support for artsd instead of using linux sound device directly.

Do the sound work with any program (does KDE give sounds when opening and closing windows)?

See this:
http://linuxlab.dk/tipsntricks/pics/xmms-plugins.png
Look for that setting, and run xmms like you usually would.

*Or*

Run "artsdsp xmms"

Also see this:
http://docs.kde.org/en/3.4/kdemultim...r/artsdsp.html