+1 for no userspace daemon

arts and esd, well, skipping isn't a good description of the problems *I*
encountered with those. It was more 'no sound at all because it
spontaneously crashed' for arts, and 'no sound at all because of a
ludicrous and dysfunctional nonauthentication system' for esd.

Thankfully pulseaudio isn't a pile of crap like arts or esd and so doesn't
have any of those problems that I can see. :)

(Among other things PA runs at realtime priority so that it won't skip
just because of CPU load: if you're swapping so hard that its being
swapped out is problematic, I doubt that whatever was playing the music is
going to be in memory much longer either.)