I'm currently using child_process and command-line mplayer to play audio on the local machine, with my Node.JS application. This works, but it's not really an excellent solution. My biggest issue is that it takes 500ms from mplayer is started to audio starts playing.
Are there better ways to play audio? Preferably compressed audio, but I'll take what I can get.
I think what you asking is there any good modules that work with audio in the nodejs ecosystem?
Whenever you have this type of question you should first go the npmjs and just type a appropiate keyword.
Here is list of modules that related to audio I found on the npmjs site.
substacks's baudio looks good to me.