Well .. I managed to get my XMMS player to play mp3 files and I seem to have got everything to work...however once i log off and log on again... and try to play my mp3s... it says:
to check if you have the right plugin
no program is blocking the sound card
your sound card is configured propely

I know for sure that sound card is alright because I manage to get the 3 sounds when I tested it.

I don't know abt the other two options though.
Currently I am running the Gaim messenger and it has sounds when messages are sent ... however when i turn off all the sounds through preferences ... the problem still exits.

Any help or insights would be great!

It sounds like you have a sound card that only allows one stream of audio at a time. If some other program is open that uses the sound card, then nothing else can have access to it. The alternative is to run a sound daemon that will allow multiple inputs to your sound card at once. There are several out there, depending on the window maanger that you are using. Kde has aRts, gnome has ESD.

If you don't want to worry about a sound server, then you will have to shut down the program that is currently tying up your sound device (/dev/dsp). To find out what is using it, as root, issue the following command:



This command will return the process ID of what is locking it, and you can compare that with the output of "ps aux" to see which is causing the problem, and either close it, or kill the process with kill -15 idnumber.