1. Alsa drivers are muted on boot-up by default. Run "alsamixer" and set the main (leftmost) volume setting (hint "alsamixer" has strange key settings).

2. "alsactl store" stores your current settings in /etc/asound.state and "alsactl restore" restores the settings from the same file.

3. You can use OSS compatible applications by loading the OSS layer in ALSA either by compiling it in the kernel or loading it as a module.

4. ALSA allows multiple applications to access the sound driver at the same time. You need to have a .asoundrc file like the one enclosed.

Now in order to accomplish (4) there were a number of different daemons written in the past esd, artsd, jackd, ...

As Ben said:

Your are in a maze of sound daemons all alike.

One of them throws a sound at your sound card. It gets stuck.

Oh, dear!

Your process seems to have killed itself (D) and the sound driver with it ...

... I haven't done this before but do you want me to reboot?

The .asoundrc file

    
pcm.!default {
    type plug slave.pcm "dmixer"
}

pcm.dsp {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "dmixer"
}

pcm.dmixer  {
    type dmix
    ipc_key 1024
    slave {
    pcm "hw:0,0"
    period_time 0
    period_size 1024
    buffer_size 8192
    #periods 128
    rate 44100
    }
    bindings {
    0 0
    1 1
    }
}

ctl.mixer0 {
    type hw
    card 0
}