Other Sounds Playing Over Winamp

[rfinger]

On friends computers and on my old computer, it used to be that when Winamp played, it silenced any other program's noises, beeps, or alerts while you had your mp3s going. For some reason now, every program, such as AIM, Eudora's mail notification, alert windows from Windows, and others play over Winamp while I'm playing music. This gets especially annoying when the sounds are louder than the music played, in which you either get blasted because you turned your speakers up, or it just interrupts what's going on.

I e-mailed Creative Labs (Soundblaster maker) and they said that it was a software issue, not a hardware one. Does anyone know how to fix this? Is this a Winamp issue in that I need a special plugin or need to set something in the preferences, or is this an issue with other software. I have a Soundblaster Live Value sound card in my computer, if that helps. Please, PLEASE let me know.

Thanks!!!!!

[DJ Egg]

You can try going to:
Audio HQ Control Panel -> Device Controls:
Set "Maximum simultaneous Wave playback" to 1 (options = 0 to 32)

Or, you could try checkmarking "alt setting mode" in:
Winamp -> Prefs -> Plugins -> Output -> WaveOut -> config.
You should now be able to turn Winamp's volume up via the slider in the main window & the pre-amp slider in the EQ window (but to avoid distortion, don't go too high on this), and turn the other sounds down by lowering the Wave slider in Windows Volume Control. Maybe compensate by turning up the main Play Control slider up a bit ?!?!

The only other workarounds are referenced here:

RE: How to prevent other sounds from playing simultaneously (Windows sound events, etc)
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=48242
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....324#post351324
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=75053

Basically, Windows 9x didn't natively support the playback of multiple audio streams, but WinME/2k/XP does. However, most modern soundcards (yr 2000+) support multiple audio streams, regardless of Windows OS.