Serial sound?

[worker201]

A friend and I both separately noticed a strange problem in FC2. Me with xmms, and he with rhythmbox. They play mp3s and such just fine, but when you stop them, all the sounds you missed are played back to you in one orderly but meaningless burst. If you are running a chat program that notifies via sound, this can be extremely harsh.

Is anyone else familiar with this problem? More to the point, does anyone have a solution? I am using Alsa 1.2.10 as my output plugin for xmms, but I have many others to choose from - might one of these solve the problem?

TIA, as usual

[Void Main]

You have to have all of your sound programs use Alsa. I'm guessing that the ones that don't get played are not using Also but OSS instead.

[worker201]

In theory, all of them could use OSS or esound, right? As long as all of them are the same sound controller? Gaim is pretty much the only noisemaker I have, and I don't think it has alsa support.

Out of curiosity, what is the pecking order? If I had an alsa device, an esd device, and an oss device all running at once, which one would take priority?

[Void Main]

Whichever one got hold of the sound device first I would think. That's why it is important to have all of them use ALSA. Don't quote me on this but I believe ALSA is the only one capable of playing sounds from multiple apps at the same time. But I could just be talking out of my rear too. I not any sort of sound system expert but that is just my experience from a user standpoint.

[worker201]

gaim is the program I am worried about. The sound options are:
Console Beep
Automatic
ESD
Arts
Command

Currently, it is set on automatic. Since I am having this problem, I doubt automatic refers to ALSA. Well, if I figure anything out, I'll let you know.

[Void Main]

How about this:

http://gaim.sourceforge.net/faq.php#q22

[worker201]

Sweetness