[LAD] mixing music and sound effects using libao

I've been playing around with libsndfile, libvorbisfile, libmodplug, and libao to provide background music and sound effects for a game engine. I have a solid handle on making one noise at a time, but I don't understand mixing. At first I thought I would have to write my own mixer and handle the channels, sample rate, and sample size issues myself. I really don't want to have to do that. Then I noticed in the libao documentation that nothing says that I cannot spawn two threads, each of which calls ao_open_live() and ao_play() on different sound files. Indeed, the docs for ao_initialize() seem to suggest this can be done with the statement that it be called in the main thread. I tried this and it works so erratically that I'm not sure libao was written with this in mind. I get these results in order of likelihood: 1) "Segmentation fault" 2) "*** glibc detected *** ./threadtest7: malloc(): memory corruption (fast): 0x0000000001bc5390 *** Bus error" 3) "*** glibc detected *** ./threadtest7: double free or corruption (out): 0x00000000018ba2e0 ***" 4) A bit of the first file, then the second file. 5) Only the second file. 6) Both files messily mixed with a zipping noise. (very rare) Is libao in fact intentionally capable of doing this? If not, what are my options for mixing music and sound effects? I really don't want to use SDL_mixer for a variety of reasons, chiefly because my program is terminal-only. Virtual beer if you can guess what the program is. -- David Griffith dave(a)661.org A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?