Linux Audio..
..is a disaster. If the ALSA developers had any honor, they'd fall on their swords, or hurl themselves from the nearest bridge / tall building. dmix is broken and apparently it's never going to get fixed, which leaves us the alternatives of either using crappy fly-by-night sound servers to hide the problem, or accepting that more than one application playing sound at a time is just too difficult for Linux in 2009. Nevermind that a few years ago, when I used OSS and the emu10k driver for an SB Live (that is, before the Linux kernel developers deprecated OSS), mixing was happily handled by the driver behind the scenes without the quirks or insanely high (and unpredictable) CPU usage that dmix entails, I wasn't forced to run half my software though the "aoss" wrapper, and games like Quake 3 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein actually worked with sound. Simultaneously, dmix seems the only way to coax sound out of ALSA that isn't a complete pain in the ass, but the illusion of workingness is soon shattered the first time you catch it spending 40% CPU to (purportedly) resample from 44.1 KHz to 48 KHz. There's surely a bug here, as the CPU usage is completely unpredictable, and repeatedly opening/closing the device will yield wildly varying results.

I hate it. All I wanted to do was write a simple goddamn music player.