patch from Pierre Lombard <p_l@gmx.fr> If the sound channel is already busy the async open fails and returns -EBUSY. There's no need to try to open it synchronously as it will block mplayer till the sound channel is released. (Granted there's a very slight chance your sound device happen to be freed between those two calls but it's not the common case). The behavior is changed by this oneliner to match the ao_oss behavior (disable sound if the sound device is busy).