That looks perfect, apart from the lack of resampling -- most of my samples are at 44100kHz but my soundcard runs at 48000.

Other news on trying to resolve this issue:

I came across a sample auditioning app called sauditor with a Curses interface which is great except that it loads the samples into RAM before playing them, bringing my system to its knees if I accidentally select a really long one.  So I'll have to add streaming from disk to my requirements...

I also tried `mplayer -ao jack ...` but haven't got it to work yet - although I have the livna version which claims to have --with-jack compiled in, running `mplayer -ao help` gives a list of drivers that doesn't include jack, so the file manager solution won't work until I figure out how to fix that.

Nathaniel