title: Why does PortAudio not play nicely with other audio programs or how can I get it to?
body: <p>I am trying to write an audio application using PortAudio, but if any other audio programs (usually Firefox) are running at the time which I try to run my program, I get the following error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>PaHost_OpenStream: could not open /dev/dsp for O_WRONLY
  PaHost_OpenStream: ERROR - result = -10000
  An error occured while using the portaudio stream
  Error number: -10000
  Error message: Host error.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Obviously, this makes my program pretty useless since it won't work if another program is using sound.  Is there a way to get around this or should I just not use PortAudio?</p>