Comment 30 for bug 732572

We discussed this on IRC a bit. I suggested looking at using libcanberra for this, as it provides a simple API with an async completion callback. It's not ideal as it requires writing the sound to a tmpfile because libcanberra's API requires either a predefined event (which we're already using for canned sounds) or a path to a file. The advantage of this approach is that libcanberra supports multiple sound backends, relieving us of dealing with that.

If that approach doesn't work or doesn't make sense, then we're going to need at least an ALSA implementation (which can then work with OSS, ALSA, and PulseAudio via ALSA plugins). Depending on how much code and complexity is required to implement this, it may make sense to wait for my work in bug 623444 to land. That bug will provide a simple API for non-blocking sound playback and completion.