On many an occasion I've heard people talk about how 'without artsd or esd etc. you can only play one sound at a time' ie. no xmms and mplayer at the same time. However, I don't seem to have this problem, and I'm *not* using a sound daemon (I don't find the idea of them pleasing for some reason).
For example, I can listen to XMMS and play NWN, listen to a movie on mplayer, all at the same time with no problems whatsoever.

I'm confused at to why this is. As far as I know, in theory (because obviously not in practice) you cannot do this.

Some background:
I'm using Slackware 9.1, with kernel 2.6.8-rc2 (compiled myself with sound components as modules) with a Sound Blaster Live 5.1. I'm using (among the other standard modules) emu10k1.
For my whole history of using Linux (including back in my Mandrake days, approx. 8 months ago) I've always been able to play multiple sound samples at the same time without any problem, and most importantly, no sound daemon. I tried using a sound daemon once but I couldn't get it to work (back in my Mandrake days where I just starting to become knowledgeable about Linux), although I haven't tried recently - and I don't want to incase I muck up what I have now .

This isn't an urgent thing, as there really isn't a problem to solve, I'm just curious... any thoughts or anyone else experiencing this?

Hi Valindar,

I heard the same thing about using ALSA and only being able to use one source on the sounddevice at once. It often happend that rhythmbox stopped palying 'cause gaim or any other small program was using the device while swithcing songs.
I recently messed around with ALSA and now I could - it wouldn't make much sense - using rhythmbox, mplayer and xmms at the same time, so i guess its possible to use multiple soundsource dircetly on ALSA.

As I am using Gentoo I bumb over this, which illustrate quite well how to get ALSA working...

Greets
G.