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Hello, I'm having this problem with audio, whenever I'm on something started by playonlinux any other program doesn't play any sound.
Youtube is muted, skype notifications play only after I close whatever program/game playonlinux is running, calls have no audio at all...
I googled a bit and found someone suggesting to set hardware acceleration to emulation in the winecfg.
I looked in the wine configuration for a game I play on pol but in the audio tab I don't have an option to set change hardware acceleration.
Anyone had similar problems?

What distribution do you use? (e.g Ubuntu, Fedora, etc)
Do you have ALSA set up correctly?
Does your distribution use pulseaudio?
Write in your terminal: ps -aux | grep pulseaudio

and paste the result here.

PlayOnLinux doesn't monopolize sound because its a WINE wrapper (it just manages WINE, nothing else, it doesn't even play sounds as I know), there's something misconfigured in your system :(

I'll try to help as much as I can, but since this is more of a distribution problem I recommend going to your distribution community forums and check out why the sound mixing isn't working.

Edited by allenskd

You're right, I didn't provide information that should always be provided when asking for help, my bad.
I'm on debian sid.
I would assume that alsa is configured correctly, everything else works properly and I can use multiple sound requesting programs at the same time (except wine).
I do have pulseaudio.
The output of the command you asked for is:
arkindal  2676  7.7  0.1 663796 15480 ?        S<l  13:56  27:37 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start
arkindal  4076  0.0  0.0  10360   904 pts/0    S+   19:50   0:00 grep pulseaudio


Thanks for your time, I appreciate it.

Okay... what Desktop Environment are you using? (KDE, GNOME?). I'm still learning the hoops with linux audio stuff so if anyone cares to jump in to correct me feel free to do so.

If you are using KDE there's a possibility that you are using gstreamer as a backend. Point is, let's say that some apps are using ALSA directly and other apps are trying to use pulseaudio. What I'm trying to do is that everything goes to one source only (like letting pulseaudio handle all the mixing, etc)

It happened to me that if I opened a sound directly to hw:0,0 in ALSA, and pulseaudio tried to play something the device would be marked as busy so things wouldn't play. Same could have happened to you.

Let's cut to the chase before I start convoluting things.

1) in your terminal type gstreamer-properties , make sure that the default is pulseaudio and of course test the sound.
2) In your different applications, change the audio output to pulseaudio (called just pulse sometimes)
3) Ensure that the multimedia backend of your desktop environment is using pulseaudio

I use XFCE, I shouldn't have gstreamer, giving the command in (1) gives as result "command not found".
Everything should be using pulseaudio, I did the settings via pavucontrol.