Hey Atle, > I have three computers in daily use, on two of them Wine works fine. And on the two which are working, I am able to use wine with sound at the same time as I am using Firefox and playing youtube Flash videos. And this is without pulse audio. Okay, that is good. you have points of comparison.... > I am no expert on linux sound, so I don't know why this works, or why it shouldn't work. > I've read the FAQ's and man pages of Wine, and /dev/dsp is mentioned. Also testing write access to /dev/dsp to check if some other application is blocking the device. But as far as I understand, /dev/dsp is OSS related, and is not relevant for ALSA. You are correct, that sounds like they are talking about OSS, and not ALSA. > So my obvious question is: > - does ALSA really also have the "only one access at a time" limitation mentioned? Yes, indeed ALSA does. That is why ESD was developed, and why Pulseaudio is now in use. Alsa talks to the hardware, while apps may be talking to Pulseaudio/kmix and then are routed to ALSA. or are directly talking to ALSA - in which case they will grab the device and potentially block all other apps. Jack also works on top of ALSA, and combats issues like these (although it is designed more for low-latency pro-audio use). > - if so, what trick allows me to play sound from multiple applications, including Wine, at the same time on two of my machines? Are you running KDE? (you mention Kmix below) Kmix allows you to do this. It is a sound daemon, much similar (in concept) to things like Pulseaudio, ESD, etc. > And as I mentioned, I am pretty sure I'm not using pulse audio. nope, it sounds like you are not! :) This one sounds tricky, as you say that "it used to work". It's pretty hard for me to retrace your steps.. But if i was in your shoes, that is exactly what i would be doing! Retracing my own steps: i would ask myself things like "did i do an update, change settings, did my computer crash, have i installed any new applications or libraries ...things along these lines. As i don't use kmix, i know very little about it...Nor do i use KDE. jordan
