I kept getting told that sound resources were already in use, etc, etc, maybe I want to consider a sound daemon. Well I do! So I researched around these keywords - sound daemon to allow multiple simultaneous sound sources.

I decided to follow this guide http://doc.gwos.org/index.php/Hear_multiple_sounds

and it all works a treat! It’s just a shame that such an apparently simple fix didn’t make it into the standard ubuntu desktop installation. AFAICR all of the required packages were already installed on my machine leaving the simple addition of .conf file for it all to work.