A last post to close the issue.
After some testing with this and that among those wonderful solutions you gave me I have finally decided to use ... none of them
Since I'm using
sox as my "play-engine", what I'm doing instead is take the laziest route and just parse the output of "
soxi -a". Crude, primitive, but it works
Thanks again to all. This thread goes to my personal archive and will doubtless be perused for reference when(/if) I build the full fledged player.