On 10/31/07, Samuel Proulx <traumator@gmail.com> wrote:
quoted text
> Hello,
>
> I have been using obsd as my primary desktop for a while now and i have a question about the sound system , is there a way to play
> two sounds at the same time ? Example watching youtube videos with opera and playing some music in the background with mpd or xmms .
> thank you for your time  ; )

Unix has always been kind of weak in this area. You need a mixer of
some sort to do this. Not /dev/mixer, which controls audio volumes for
the different hardware devices, but a software mixer.
You'll probably want http://ports.openbsd.nu/audio/esound. There's
something called Pulse which is intended as a drop in (but superior)
replacement for esound, and someone () ported it to OpenBSD, but it's
not in the tree yet.
Reading http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup might be
enlightening; it describes how to configure each program you want to
use to use pulse.

Looking around some more, here's something like how you'd have to
configure mpd to use esound:
audio_output {
        type      "ao"
        driver    "esd"
        options   "host=jurp5-desktop:16001"
        name      "esd"
}

Yes, you need to have each program direct it's output to the mixer,
there's no way (as far as I know) to sneakily make /dev/audio be a
software mixer. I don't know if the reason there's no /dev/audio_mix
is technical, or if it's just that no one's done the work, or if it's
just a tradition now.

-Nick