What bothers me about gmplauncher is that is automatically searches for media to add. It's a feature I don't have any use for. Just give me a config file where I can define my media folders. What makes it worse is I have a few folders that contain a huge number of text/html files and now every time a media crawler runs it takes over the cpu for 5-10 minutes. I suppose I can nice the crawlers, but I'd just as soon be rid of them entirely.

Um what's with the sound system? Isn't the equalizer affecting the media directly? I mean on a friend's machine, when using some kind of CD Burning tool (Just can't remember it's name, it was for Windows) there was an option to record AudioCDs with equalizered (not normalized!) songs. So I thought it does have nothing to do with the sound system.
Excuse me if I'm talking nonsense, I have absolutely no idea of media playback (except for directly playing uncompressed audio stream in .NET 2.0 (: )