What is "esound"

Esound (also referred to as ESD) is a small sound daemon for both Linux and UNIX. ESD was created to provide a consistent and simple interface to the audio device, so applications do not need to have different driver support written per architecture. It was also designed to enhance capabilities of audio devices such as allowing more than one application to share an open device. ESD accomplishes these things while remaining transparent to the application, meaning that the application developer can simply provide ESD support and let it do the rest. On top of this, the API is designed to be very similar to the current audio device API, making it easy to port to ESD.