more than one application using the sound system

[cman]

Hi! I dont know if it is normal at the begining but in my system it is not possible to have more than one aplication at the same time using the sound.. (for example, if I am listening music with amarok, and I open firefox, then I can play anything with sound in firefox (for example videos from youtube) and even if I close the amarok it is necesary to restart the firefox in order to listen the videos...)

Any solution for this ( i tried already something modifing the etc/asound.conf and the asoundrc files..)

Thanks in advance.

[dibl]

Re: more than one application using the sound system

It sounds more normal than not. I think it depends on the sound hardware, to some extent. I have the Intel HDA and I use ALSA. Mine works like this:

Amarok playing -- Firefox will play Youtube with sound.
Anything else using sound -- Audacity won't play anything.
Anything on Linux using sound -- VMWare Player can't use sound

[cman]

Re: more than one application using the sound system

Yes, I know that this kind of problems are quite normal in linux.. but the important fact is that in Opensuse (the distribution I used before) I could use vmware, firefox and amarok with sound at the same time for example... only with a modification of my asoundrc..

[Bejje]

Re: more than one application using the sound system

I have the same problem. This is not a problem in any Windows version I've used so it's not a hardware limitation. Must be some way to solve this. Anyone knows how?

[cman]

Re: more than one application using the sound system

I found something, I going to try downloading alsa-oss package and trying something with this:

" * You might want to play a game and listen to music on your favorite music player at the same time. To do this successfully, you will have to use ALSA since it supports this feature the best. On all the music players I know of, you can configure the sound engine, to any module that is available.
* The setting is usually found under something like Tools >>> Configure >>> Player Engines.
* For games, it is a bit more tricky since there is not always a way to configure the player engine directly. Most games, however, do support the OSS. ALSA has an OSS module that allows OSS applications to use the ALSA driver.
* To do this you will need the alsa-oss package sudo apt-get install alsa-oss
* After doing this step, it is very easy to use alsa-oss. In the shell, you can type 'aoss' then the name of the program name you want to use with alsa-oss."

Maybe there is an automatically way to not to have to write aoss every time you start a program.

[dibl]

Re: more than one application using the sound system

I guess I could have a been little more forthcoming in my earlier reply. Yes, I always install these sound packages to get best results on my rig:

alsa-base
alsa-oss
alsa-tools-gui
alsa-utils
alsamixergui
alsaplayer-alsa

There are quite a few more on the list if you look in adept, and I have frankly not made myself a student of the subject, beyond learning to work with Audacity and recording/playback. My main focus was to do some recording of an old record collection, so it didn't matter about the multi-channel thing. If someone can learn more and share the information, I'm sure everyone would be glad to get it.