im working on getting jack and a few other sound things running. ardour and hydrogen so far. well, i downloaded xmms-jack to get xmms to output on jack as well. that way i can lsiten to music and keep ardour (and jack) open at the same time as xmms and still be able to use both. but, when playing songs in xmms, i only get sound coming from the left speaker. i've played around with the input and output channels in jack, made sure my balace was centered, made sure my speakers were hooked up right, even tested with hydrogen through jack to make sure it saw that i had two output channels. with hydrogen, sound comes out both channels. but does hydrogen output in mono? i think it might. whereas xmms outputs in stereo. but that's fine isn't it? cuz isn't the whole point of jack's input/output channels to be able to define what it gets and puts out. i set input to 2 and output to 2 (by default they were set to 0???), figuring i'm inputting to jack in stereo (xmms) and outputting to stereo (my speakers) doens't work. i've tried every combination (always restarting jack between tries) from 0 to 2. for both input and output. unless i missed one or two here or there. but i dont' think so. is there a config option, or perhaps a setting i missed at compile time? or is it just fucking up? i just imagine it's for some reason only taking in the left channel and that's it stuck on mono for input. and outputting on both. but since it only picks up the left channel from xmms, it only outputs the left channel. so i figure it's the input channels in jack that are screwed up. but alas, as iv'e said, changing them seems to do nothing.//

well, i've gotten jack and xmms working (except xmms crashes when i restart jack, but that's fine for now, as i keep jack running almost all the time) for some reason xmms-jack, despite what the changelog for it says, doens't automatically set up the connections the right way, and i have to add the connection to my also out right speaker. anyway...i'm looking for as many jack enabled clients as possible. well...one's that i'll use. for instance...is there any possiblity of a gaim jack plugin? one of my biggest problems with linux is that when i'm running xmms, i can't hear IM sounds. thus, i always get sidetracked doing something. or i'll get an IM right when xmms is switching songs, and i get a popup saying "Card busy, blah blah blah" and i have to go back to xmms and hit play again. not to mention various games and such, but i spend most of my time using gaim and listening to music, which is why this is my main concern. does anyone know of a plugin for gaim that'll make it work with jack, or would this require a rewrite of the code that gaim uses to play sounds?//

Try the Esound daemon, it claims it can handle more than one audio application at a time.

I actually ended up going with the dmix plugin for alsa. works like a charm.//