AlsaPlayer is a new type of PCM player. It is heavily multi-threaded and tries to excercise the ALSA library and driver quite a bit. It has some very interesting features unique to Linux/Unix players. The goal is to create a fully pluggable framework for playback of all sorts of media with the focus on PCM audio data. The core code was written by Andy Lo-A-Foe with contributions from many other folks. See the credits files for details.
The name AlsaPlayer might be confusing a bit today since we now support a whole bunch of different output systems. The old default OSS audio interface is supported, as well as Esound, NAS (Network Audio Server), Sparc and SGI audio outputs. the most interesting new output is JACK. JACK is different from other audio server efforts in that it has been designed from the ground up to be suitable for professional audio work. This means that it focuses on two key areas: synchronous execution of all clients, and low latency operation. We believe that this interface will become the preferred one. JACK uses ALSA for interfacing with the audio hardware.