Hello, again, excuse the very basic nature of my question, I should have found these answers myself, but I tried long and just couldn't. Maybe the internet as such dislikes me. I want to do something very basic. Basically that is let multiple programs talk to my soundcard at the same time. Simple example: XMMS is playing a song, someone on IRC uses a keyword to page me, my XChat perl script calls some form of command line mp3/wav playback program and plays a sound that gets my attention. Or XMMS is playing and I access a webpage with a Flash animation. Or the aforementioned paging situation happens while watching a movie with mplayer. Currently, none of those are possible to me. I must say I am very ignorant in this area still, am really willing to educate myself but find myself unable to find anything BASIC on this. A little FAQ on basic terminology would be grand already. What do you call things like ALSA, Esound and what not? How does stuff like KDE's aRts fit in? Anyway, I am running ALSA 0.5. I have tried to upgrade to an ALSA 0.9x once, but I remember faintly there were serious problems, so I tried to circumvent that upgrade for the time being. Will an ALSA 0.9x version offer me this functionality of multiple sound sources at the same time? I used esound once too, while I'm absolutely foggy as to how that worked. I installed it, told XMMS to talk to esound and then used a play utility that came along with esound. That's how I solved the XMMS is playing + notify sound from XChat should play situation. But esound seems to have the latency of a really tired old man, and that looked plain retarded with the little visualization window of XMMS. I know I know, not the end of the world, but other programs also didn't like to talk to esound (including mplayer). Will I need to upgrade to ALSA 0.9 then? Is that the standard right now? What other options do I have? Again, if you can just point me to a general FAQ about all this, please by any means do so. Many thanks, Daniel