This has not been a fast process. I've been at this for over half a
year and just got sound to work.

Sound was working before but I had no volume control, elsewhere
the mixer vol control would come up unconfigured.

Those headaches are passed for the time being. I just loaded the
sound file in the previous post and RealPlayer did some interesting
things like loading an image from the site.

I started my speakerbuilding from the wish to be able to get
good sound from low power sources. Now I would like to improve
the sound from streaming audio and do some wave file editing.

There are tools in Linux to do this.

Why I'm saying all this is that I have a question on latency which seems to be a big deal for musicians using a Linux
distribution called aGnula/Demudi (for Debian Music Distribution).

What is the latency factor from the audiophile point of view?

There are some interesting proggies in Demudi. One is called JACK
and that is supposed to be able to patch together midis, keyboards,
USB devices etc and have it all work.

I am more interested in the multimedia of video and audio files.

Oh yeah, just lately there was news about a DVDshrinker called k9copy. So the tools for multimedia are being developed but still
behind Windows in some areas.