Ben, Thanks for taking an interest in libao. Just so you know, there are a couple of things outstanding. Jeff Waugh asked whether we'd be willing to relicense libao so it can be used with proprietary applications. We have permission from the original authors to do this (either LGPL or BSD) and from Lennart Poettering, but not for most of the plugins. So if we did this the next release would have a more liberal license for the core, but most of the plugins would still be GPL. To continue to be useful, libao needs a latency feedback function added to the api so it can be used in video players. Basically, the caller needs to know where in the playback buffer sound is actually playing to it can syncronize video display or munge the audio to stay in sync with some external clock. This isn't a small undertaking, obviously, but it would make libao more generally useful. If you have any questions about these, or other bits, just let us know! -r