What sound deamon to use with ALSA?
 

Hi there,

I hope this question hasn't been answered yet - I couldn't find it here at lq.org.

I'm using Linux for about nine months now, got pretty familiar with it and think that this OS and my distro (another happy slacker ;-) is definitely the best choice for me and my machine ;-)
While updating Slack to 9.1, I made the decision to furthermore use ALSA-drivers for my soundcard.
ALSA 0.9.6 works very fine, way better than the standard-drivers in kernel 2.4.22, but I still got one problem:
I'm unsure what sound deamon to use. I started with artsd, tried esd, and was not satisfied with both of them, and jack (however it works, I didn't get through well) seems to complicated for me. My question to you is what deamon to use with my PC for the following requests:

I usually use my PC to play mp3s, but want to be able to play up to 3 sounds parallel to that (so 4 at all), I need something with low cpu usage, memory doesn't interest (says the man with the gigabite RAM ;-), and low buffering (500 msec max.).

I'd appreciate if you could post your experiences with the deamons you're using and perhaps tell me why and why not I should choose it.

Many thanks in advance!

Regards,

Seppel