Ideas for a good linux soundcard.

[charon]

I've used linux on and off for quite some time now, but recently I decided to make it my primary operating system. However, for me to be comfortable with using an operating system, i must have a soundcard which will play multiple sounds simultaneoussly. I have a motherboard with AC97 onboard sound, a creative sound blaster live!, and a generic creative soundcard (unsure of the kind...on both actually, i've had them for several years). Not one of these soundcards will play more than one sound at a time on a *nix system.

I was wondering if anyone would know of a cheap soundcard to buy, which will play sounds on linux as they are played on windows. I've gotten used to listening to music while speaking to multiple people on gaim, and even having alert sounds go off here and there. I have little experiance with sound in linux, so please don't hesitate to tell me if this is not possible. However, I doubt a program should queue up the sounds it wants to play. This is very annoying while talking to people on aim/yim/msn etc.

[valan]

My old Yamaha card does the multi sound thing just fine. It's probably not the card, but instead the drivers. I'm using OSS, you're probably using Alsa. I believe Alsa can do that, but I got no idea how.

[techieMoe]

It's probably not the card, but instead the drivers. I'm using OSS, you're probably using Alsa. I believe Alsa can do that, but I got no idea how.

I'm pretty sure that's the case. Some sound daemons in Linux are single-channel FIFO by default. I couldn't tell you how to fix that, though.

[charon]

Well, I installed OSS, and it turned out that it works. The quality sucks, but it does what I need it to. Thankyou very much!

[Ethyriel]

Just as long as you realize that it's more the onboard sound than OSS. Both OSS and Alsa have sounded great on my CS4630 Hercules GTXP and my new M-Audio audiophile 2496. OSS also worked like a champ on the M-Audio Rev 5.1 I owned briefly, though Alsa doesn't have support yet.

I couldn't tell from your wording, but just to make sure you aren't blaming things on OSS unjustly.

If you want Alsa to play multiple sounds at once with a sound card without a hardware mixer, try using dmix in your /etc/asound.conf
I haven't done it myself, so I can't guide you, but you can typically find the necessary config in the Alsa documentation linked to from their sound card database.
www.alsa-project.org