Paul Johnson wrote:
On Saturday 06 May 2006 16:47, Marty wrote:My system is stock Sarge, with Gnome and stock Debian kernel. I rarely use OSS programs, and when I did try to use one recently I found that OSS was not working. After some investigation I found that it started working again after I unchecked the "enable sound server startup" option in the Gnome applications->desktop preferences->sound dialog box. Now all programs seem to have sound, but I can only run one OSS program at a time. (ALSA programs still share the soundcard.)This isn't an OSS or esound limitation. Your sound card can only play one sound at a time. Esound can work around this for esound-enabled programs. But what you really want in the long run is something like a SoundBlaster 128 Live!, which costs only $30 and can play many sounds at once.
I don't recall having this problem with OSS programs before, therefore I concluded, maybe incorrectly, that esound had been mixing OSS program sound.
Another twist is that I'm not using real OSS, but ALSA OSS emulation. Obviously that crucial detail should have been in my original post.