Ok, I can only get sound with one program at a time. Either amarok or firefox or whatever, but not at the same time. It's rather irritating to have to close half my apps trying to figure out which is causing it or not. I have attempted to create an .asoundrc file, but have been unsuccessful as all the guides I have found for it are very opaque and it seems they are intended to use .asoundrc for other purposes.

My question is, is there a guide that explains how to route sound to the sound card to allow more than one application to use it at the same time?

Does it still happen if you don't use KDE or any KDE apps?

I'm asking because I've had this problem or a similar one, and in my case it seemed to be KDE-specific:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...stream-799674/

Hi, there is an alsa script you can run to see

what is and is not available to the alsa system.

You can find it here.

http://git.alsa-project.org/?p=alsa-...s/alsa-info.sh

When you run it, type --help for options, like no upload, no check for update, where to save file, etc.

I use kde4, and with that 'pulse audio' is the main mixer of program sounds.

Regards Glenn

Well, the issue really only came up when I started playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I don't really know what happened. Maybe something about this command: "echo 'wolfsp.x86 0 0 direct' > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss"? Also, virtual box has never reliably outputted sound. It has at times, but I never really bothered to diagnose it as I only use it for one app that doesn't need sound.

Here's the output of alsa-info: http://pastebin.com/U8F5sW4M Everything looks in order to me.

Anyone know where I can find a 64 bit Pulse Audio slackware package? I suppose I'll attempt compiling it. I've tried in the past, but it has so many deps that either it doesn't work or I just give up in exhaustion from installing dep after dep.

I'm pretty sure this is the complete Howto:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...2/#post3709996

Summary: all you should have to do is make sure every app is playing sound through ALSA and not OSS.

You are using OSS (or ALSA's OSS compatibility) for Return to Castle Wolfenstein. This locks up the sound card and you will not be able to play other sound...it is preferable to use alsa for everything if possible. If you can get your game to output to alsa then the problem will likely be solved, but if not you may need to direct output to a sound server (which in turn outputs to alsa). My favourite was actually arts but I don't think that's too relevant anymore, and I don't know anything about phonon in KDE4. pulse will probably work...I just don't particularly like it myself. This page suggests a possible hack...but I can't vouche for it, not having played the game myself.

Hmm... Yea, it seems wolfenstein wants to use /dev/dsp which if I'm not mistaken what oss uses and alsa doesn't. I tried changing to /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p, since that's what amarok seems to use, but no luck.