Hi Ramesh, Its possible to play two sounds at the same time in Linux. I have tried that using OSS drivers for the Opti sound card (I have run more than 6 instances of mpg123 program). I haven't tried it using the ALSA driver, but ideally it should be supported.
I think the driver for your sound card is not supporting it, may be because the hardware is not supporting it, or the developer has decided not to support (BTW, which is your sound card?). Since you will be playing the music, when the messenger tries to play the sound it will not be able to play the sound as the application playing the music would have acquired the device. If the driver supports multiple access, then it should accept the data from the messenger and buffer it inside the driver. If the driver does not support multple access, then the messenger will be told to retry again by the driver. The messenger will not just discard the data (I think it should either discard the data or inform the user that sound could not be played as a beep is not an important sound), but insted it keeps it in a buffer in the application. This buffer keeps growing and it will be dumped to the audio driver once the application playing the music is closed or you stop the music (but application may be still open, depends on how the app is written). Closing or stopping the music playing app will release the device and other apps can access it. The solutions could be 1. As Shashi told, disable the beeps. 2. Get the source of the Driver/Application and then compile it to suit your need. (provided the hardware supports it, usually they do) May be you can try this. Keep playing the music for a long time and simultaneously try to send a lot of beeps from the messenger (I mean a __LOT__), and after some time the messenger should crash because of the buffer overrun. This would take a long time since a beep takes very little memory. If this happens then my explanation is correct or else I am wrong. Regards, Suresh On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 16:31:36 +0530, Ramesh Bhaskar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hey, > Does linux have support for sending the sound output of various > applications simultaneously to the sound card? Because its very > annoying when I'm listening to music and chatting at the same time, > and when I switch of the music I get millions of beeps which were to > come with the chat application? Anyway to work around this? I'm using > slackware 9.1 > > Rgds > Ramesh > -- "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." Mark Twain
