Hi
I'm using Mandrake 10.1 Comunity
I wonder how to make multiple applications use the sound card at the same time.
Like listen to music and play games at the same time.
Thanks

What kind of sound card do you have?

There are "low level" kernel drivers and there are application level drivers for the sound card.

The latter (such as Alsa/Arts) grab the device and provide a software interface to the applications which want to output sound.

So if you configure KDE and XMMS (as well as other programs) to use ALSA they can all share the sound device at the same time even when the sound card does not support this (which many poorer quality ones do not...).

By setting Xine or Kaffeine to use Alsa/Arts, I can watch a movie, listen to MP3's and hear the system events, etc. on the same sound output device w/o problems.

If however XMMS is set to use /dev/dsp directly, etc. you'll find that only one application can output sound at a time.

actually ALL of my apps are like this: when one use sound card, noone else can use. even system sound.
How can I set to ALSA?
I ran draksound:
"Your card is currently using the ALSA "snd-intel8x0" driver (default driver for your card is "snd-intel8x0")

In KDE tell it to lanch the sound server and do not use any external application to play back wave files for system events.

In XMMS tell it to use Arts (which uses Alsa) for output.

You can also do likewise for Xine and other programs.

Once done, they can all share the one sound output device w/o problems.