[gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de>]

On 12/03/2009 11:23 PM, Yoav Luft wrote:
> Hi,
> On my dell Vostro 1520, with intel hda ICH9 82801I sound card
> (xSTAC92HD71B3, according to /proc/asound/card0/codec), only one
> application can access the sound card at a time. This probably means
> that applications access the hardware, and not some software mixer. I
> tried to follow information in the alsa wiki
> (http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/pcm_plugins.html#pcm_plugins_dmix)
> for setting manually dmix, but couldn't configure anything working. I
> could find any good documentation (and I don't have plenty of time to
> dig in it, it's the middle of the semester). Does anyone can help on
> the topic?

I think all you need to do is to put the "alsasound" service in your 
default runlevel.

   rc-update add alsasound default

At least that's what I remember doing when I tried ALSA a few months 
ago.  You might need to reboot though so that the card is freed first.