Righty.
Unless you have a really cool sound card, it will not support hardware mixing.
Your sound card can only play one sound at a time, and therefore the sound cards device node can only be opened by one application at a time.
The solution is.... Software mixing.
In the oldern days, the KDE software mixer wasnt up to much, so most applications were designed to grab exclusine access oto the sound card.
thankfully, the KDE audio mixer (arts) is alot better now, almost no lagg etc etc.
You realplayer cannot open the sound device becasee ARTS (the software mixer) has exclusive access to it.
There are 4 possable solutions (i would recomend 3 or 4)
1) dissable arts, let whatever program you are using at the time have complete direct access ot the sound card.
2) set arts to release the sound card after a period of inactivity, (maybe 5 seconds)
so that KDE and your media applications can share the sound card. (i dont recomend this)
3) Find a pluggin, or configure your media software to use the arts sound server. (i recomend this)
4) if there is no "Use ARTS sound output" option for your media player, use the arts sound wrapper.
for example, if the name of your porgram is realplayer, run the command "artsdsp realplayer"
The arts sound server will now *look* like a real sound card to your media applications, and sound will mix nicely.
In Linux, programs are usually designed by default NOT to use arts, because not everyone has KDE installed and running.
using option 3 or 4 will allow all your noisy applications to play sound at the same time, (like MSwindows does)
enjoy.
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