dtgreene: Before this era, there was the sound server aRts, which I believe was part of KDE back then.
aRts?
Now there's a name I'd completely forgotten.
I vaguely recall liking the idea, but also disabling it because of the latency and resulting AV sync issues, and it interfering
with (blocking) my video player of choice. I think that was Xine back then.
Later I think it was Kaffeine with the libxine back-end. GStreamer was another popular thing I avoided, as it usually resulted in audibly lowering the quality of audio sent through its pipeline.
At the time, Linux was not only my main OS. It was my only OS. So everything had to work properly. Including watching DVDs and playing the odd game without excessive audio latency.
EverNightX: OK, that's good to hear. Next time I setup Linux I'll experiment w/ ALSA only.
I think what I will do for my program is create an implementation for both ALSA and PipeWire.
Best of luck. ALSA has copious amounts of documentation. Unfortunately, it's mostly autogenerated and pretty useless.