I am pleased to say that I now managed to get simultaneous sound working in Debian, almost perfectly.
My "sound compatibility matrix" is now: mp/s xmms youtube skype mp/s OK OK OK OK xmms OK X OK OK youtube OK OK OK OK skype OK OK OK N/A mp/s means mplayer with sdl audio output, as before. I had to set this *both* by a line in ~/.mplayer/config: ao=sdl and through the GUI (gmplayer, preferences, audio). It appears both are necessary. The X in the combination xmms-xmms should probably be N/A, because xmms just does not allow running 2 instances of itself simultaneously. Several reactions (on-list and off-list) suggested using a sound daemon, but according to the 31 August 2007 entry on the "buglandia" blog (http://buglandia.blogspot.com), sound daemons (like esd and arts) are now *outdated*, and even somewhat *evil* ("fundamentally wrong"). The solution is software sound mixing. Apparently, sounds can be mixed by the hardware (the sound card) or by software. Windows always uses software sound mixing by default. So sound mixing always works on Windows, no matter what hardware you have. Linux, developed by and for tech types, tries to use hardware mixing if the sound card can support it (but by no means all of them do), because this is more efficient. Software mixing became something of a stepchild. But it appears that in the more modern versions (of Linux and alsa; certainly in Sid) software mixing works now. The flightgear wiki (http://tinyurl.com/38smlf) explains this better than I can. To make it work, I followed a recipe on the alsa wiki (http://tinyurl.com/2vhoqt), because the recipe on buglandia did not work for me. What did was: -- make sure there is NO /etc/asound.conf or ~/.asoundrc files present on the system. -- export two environment variables: export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=alsa export AUDIODEV=plug:dmix (you can put both commands in ~/.bash_profile). -- make sure that mplayer uses sdl for audio output. -- make sure there are no sound daemons running (jack, esd, arts, whatever). It will now work after you log out/log in, and perhaps after restarting alsa (/etc/init.d/alsasound restart). Well, I hope it does. It now does for me. Regards, Jan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]