Annoying conflict with ALSA and XMMS

[Andrew Konosky]

I usually have XMMS playing music in the background while I am on my 
computer working, but every now and then something interupts it and then 
it is a pain in the ass to get it playing again. My system is using ALSA 
for sound, and everything works. XMMS will be playing in the background 
and I will be working on the command-line. Now I accidently hit 
backspace too many times when theres no text to delete and the system 
tries to give me a warning beep, but since XMMS is playing, the "beep" 
must get queued up, and when XMMS goes to the next song, I hear that 
beep instead, then XMMS won't play anymore until I close down the 
program that made the sound. It gives the error saying the sound card is 
in use and I have to wait about 2 minutes before playing music again. 
The same thing happens in MPlayer and Xine. How do I configure the media 
applications to have priority so that I do not get interrupted by the 
system beeps all the time? I don't want to turn the beeps off, but I 
don't want them taking over my sound system when I am listening to music!