I've been looking for a high-performance music
engine. It must have an
 asynchronous control (socket, pipe?) mechanism to seperate the
 application from the audio thread.
 I'm looking for:
 start/stop samples on the beat
 scaled tempo control across all samples
 volume
 effects?
 easily wrappable (I'll write extensions, implement protocol
 plugins...) with python
 I'm trying to write something like ableton live without writing an
 engine all over again. FMODex would be *perfect* if it had a
 well-defined tempo/beat/sync interface.
 
 I think FreeWheeling might be the closest thing to Live that exists for
 Linux, have you looked at it? 
 
 Freewheeling is *so* unlike Live its hard to even link the two. Just for
 a start, Live is organized around a timeline, Freewheeling is not.