hey, I am looking for some free linux-compatible voice chat software that can run while playing americas army.

but in any other programs that use sound like gaim or beep-media-player, the first one access it ends up hogging the sound. Is that just because of the fact I'm using onboard nforce sound or is linux always like that. will I even be able to use voice chat with americas army?


Please help.

Try using Teamspeak or emulating Ventrilo through wine. Teamspeak has a native linux version so give it a whirl. Take care.
-calimer

It depends if your sound applications are using Alsa or Oss and if you're using nvidia's sound drivers or not.

To play sounds from several sources at the same time you need support for (digital) mixing. Nvidia's sound driver support hardware digital mixing but their sound driver is OSS only and had a few other issues for me.
Alsa supports software digital mixing, and you can get Alsa's OSS emulation to support it through aoss.(man aoss) Unfortunately some sounds apps doesn't work quite right when started by aoss, Ventrilo is one of them I'm afraid.

thanks for the replies, I'm running a 2.6.13 kernel with alsa installed manually. I also installed the NFORCE audio driver from nvidia's website. I don't have a program called aoss either. or is that an oss thing?

I think i'm gonna give teamspeak a whirl...

Edit: I went with skype because it has a linux native version. now all i have to do is get both their sounds to play at the same time... Any help on this?