Strange problem with my sound card

[S. M. Ibrahim]

After the installation of Mandrake 10.0 couldn't recognized my sound card. Then i install my card by "sndconf" . It's Ess1869 model

But the problem is, it can perform only one job at a time. That means, if any audio player is runing i can't hear any other sound (e.g: messenger).
Is this my problem or linux? I am asking this because, on another pc with another sound car d (bultin with intl 865 Main Board) i got the same problem.

[bigtomrodney]

This is an aRts problem usually. If you are using KDE, I would suggest going to the KDE Control Centre and to the sound section. Set the sound buffer to real time and tell it to disconnect if idle for more than a second. It's not very good at multitasking I find, so if you can use a different engine for multimedia players like Xine or Gstreamer you will most likely get on better.