Have you looked at that link I sent regarding this, I know sometimes it is best to look at examples. Also make sure that when things are unable to play simultaneiously that neither are OSS sounds, if one is then that will block the card, but you can correct this by using the aoss command when starting whatever uses OSS. If you are still having problems, then may be you need to do something a bit more. I have found more information at http://alsa.opensrc.org/home/w/org/opensrc/alsa/./index.php?title=DmixPlugin which seems to suggest sound cards without hardware mixing should automatically use dmix in some of the later versions of alsa. From Michael Whapples On Sun, 2007-03-11 at 12:26 -0700, Steve Holmes wrote: > I keep hearing comments about using dmix so a device can be shaared > between software speech and other sound sources. I have one laptop here > that cannot share its device with a standard alsa configuration. How > does one implement dmix? I see a definition for dmix in the > /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf. At present, I do not have a .asoundrc nor > /etc/asound.conf defined as I haven't needed them yet. I looked around > the alsa-project website but haven't found much. Since some people have > done that around here, I thought I'd ask here for some quick ideas. I > don't need to add anything to a kernel configuration, do I? > > The laptop I have in question has an older Yamaha type card that got > linked up as an ISA device if I remember off top of my head. I use > Slackware 11.0, with Linux 2.6.20 Kernel. When I attempt to play a wav > file with something like aplay -D dmix something.wav, I get an error > that no chanels found so it at least, finds a device but not chanels. I > figure it is a confiuration issue. > > Any ideas? >