To put it bluntly, Zinf is the most bug-ridden piece of junk I've ever encountered. Not once have I gotten decent audio from it. The only file format that Zinf can supposedly handle that Mplayer can't is shoutcast streams. Otherwise, Mplayer handles pretty much anything I throw at it. BTW, I strongly recommend against leaving out OSS emulation when building Alsa. Far too many applications still expect OSS-style support, and probably will continue to do so for some time.
