Hi am using debian (i downloaded it last week stable, not sure what ver number) kernel 2.4.something.something.

I posted it in software cos my sound works, my card works.

The problem i have is while i have sound in X (Gnome) ie. when i open an app it plays a little sound, i can't seem to get my music to play. It does work when i reinstall the ALSA drivers but not when i reboot after that. I don't really wanna have to install it everytime. The message i get from say XMMS is Couldn't Open Audio Please check that your soundcard is configed you have the correct output plugin no other prog is blocking soundcard.

Any clues?

BTW In sound prefs i have selected the option to have my sound server run at start up

Hi,
Its quite possible that the ESD daemon is keeping your soundcard busy and hence other applications are unable to access it. By the way what sound card are you using. If its an onboard card then in all probability it doesn't support hardware mixing and will take some extra setup to enable multiple sounds. To test this hypothesis, do the following:

1. Kill your sound server process. "pkill esd" will accomplish that.
2. Ensure that it actually got killed. "ps -aef| grep esd" should either show you one match ["grep esd"] or no match.
3. Now in xmms choose alsa as your output plugin. Press Apply/Save and restart xmms.
4. Now it should play the sound. However your normal GNOME sounds will stop.

In case the above approach works, you can setup your .asoundrc file for your specific soundcard to enable software mixing using dmix plugin. The guidance for that will easily flow from the friendly google.

If the approach doesn't work then will have to think of something else.

And yes if you need to save your volume settings after shoutdown and restore after startup, then you should run alsasound daemon.

Let me know what happens......

--cyberjun

Wow thanks for the quick response, you were 100% correct it worked. I then tried running xmms and another sound player at the same time and the second wouldn't play.

I am using onboard sound, i'll take a look at that mix thing now.

Your help was very... helpful. And good. hahah

Really thanks ppl like you who say type this "blah" and then this u should see this are great for hacks like me

I don't have an .asoundrc file in my hom dir is that a problem?

My sound card is ADI AD1888 onboard.

Hi,
By default it won't be present. You have to make one yourself. Following two links might be of help. If you are happy with your settings of .asoundrc, you can make it systemwide by creating a file in the /etc directory, probably called /etc/asound.conf but check with google.

http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DmixPlugin
http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=.asoundrc

--cyberjun