Annoying issue with Linux sound

To this day, linux sound device cannot be shared by multiple sound players. Typially /dev/dsp is locked by a single process and no other process can access it and output any sound. This is quite annoying because sometimes it's difficult to figure out what process has the lock on /dev/dsp. lsof does not do anything.

If you insist to reuse the sound device, you have to restart the sound service. This is /etc/init.d/alsasound on Suse Linux. Restarting the sound service will cause termination of locking process (through SIGIO or SIGPIPE I imagine) and release the sound device. After which (in gnome) add back the volume control applet to the application tray in lower right corner.