sound card weirdness? newbie question

[Rohan Nicholls]

Hi all,

I have finally made the full switch to linux, with windows running in an emulator for company oriented stuff, and I was very impressed with the improvements from potato as far as installing on my laptop, but as always I have questions.:)

I have my soundcard supported but when I start two applications that want the sound card there seems to be conflicts, so say I am using xmms to play mp3's and I browse to a web page that needs flash, the browser freezes up until I stop what ever is playing and then once the page is loaded I can continue the music. To add to the confusion, if I am playing a cd there is no problem, but then I don't think I am accessing the sound server, because I can't set equalizer settings etc. It does not matter what programs I am using ie. realplayer, xmms, browsers with flash support if one is operating the other is frozen (I assume while it waits for the sound resources to open up.)

I am running on a dell latitude laptop with a Maestro3 soundcard. I was using gnome, but found kde handled switching between sound using applications better so I am using that now, with gnome I had to completely close down the application. But it is annoying in both and I would love some help in figuring out how to fix this.

I know little about the different sound servers, and what I have read just confuses me more, but I have run into references that the different sound servers don't play well together. I am wondering if these different apps are using different servers (I also shut down the system sounds which helped), and I need to configure them to all use the same server?

thanks in advance

rohan


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