[wplug] State of Linux Sound

[Brandon Kuczenski]

Hello list.  I am writing to ask a question about a nuisance that has been 
troubling me for awhile regarding sound on Linux.  I'm using Debian with a 
modern kernel (2.6.11) and Gnome for my desktop.

The problem is with sound: specifically, only one program may make sound 
at a time; one program having control over sound causes others to fail 
silently (in multiple senses).  My understanding is that, due to /dev/dsp 
being but a single file, only one process is allowed write access to the 
file and so only one process may make sound.

The solution to this is to run a dsp broker program like Esound or aRts. 
The problem is, esound is stalled at version 0.2 and has not undergone 
development in some integer number of years.  It is buggy, has huge 
delays, and many programs don't interact well with it.  Because of that, I 
have it disabled.  I don't know if aRts works with Gnome.

However, it wouldn't help me anyway since I often have multiple users 
logged into the computer, using various window managers, any one of which 
may want to make sounds periodically.

So right now I have given various users sudo privileges to kill processes 
that might be using sound, so that they can 'steal' it on demand. But this 
is obviously not a permanent solution.

Is there any chance of this being fixed in the future?  Is it a 
deeply-seated deficiency in linux?  Some unavoidable consequence of some 
aspect of POSIX architecture?  Could it be repaired inside the kernel? 
Is that contrary to dogma?

Or, perhaps, am I misinformed about the state of the art?  Do the BSDs 
have similar problems? etc.

Thanks for info,
Brandon