Have just written an ALSA plugin for the MPFC, a song player for use in the console, based on plugins. Although I have signed the alsa-devel mailing list for a while, I've had no experience in writing such an application, and have just started reading a couple of simple tutorials, the doxygen documentation and both alsa-lib and alsa-utils sources. I couldn't figure out why periods should be set to 2, but it was needed to get a good result, and the plugin works finely. The master volume is used for volume control, and I couldn't make certain the first mixer element is the master volume either.