But on (2): unless you're a low level app directly driving the hardware, you shouldn't do this. And you especially shouldn't do this without good guarantees that system timers are indeed well behaved. Effectively, using a DLL and system timers instead of straight IRQs is a low level implementation detail, but that belongs either in the driver or in a very low level piece of code anyway (like JACK or some other audio daemon), not user applications. I was sort of throwing all of this together when I said hardware "events"; locking a DLL with a different time base to the playback hardware buffer pointer stats is still effectively that, and should be done, but only at a level low enough where you know it'll work. Which definitely isn't Android's high level thread scheduling framework.