Nice breakdown of the options, venam. Gonna have to look into some of the audio editors.

I've been rolling with ALSA (plz kill pulseaudio... as well as systemd and anything else that Poettering touches), mopidy for music daemon, since it supports Spotify, and ncmpcpp + mpc for music control. Recently added sxhkd bindings so that the play button on my keyboard makes mopidy start/stop my starred playlist :)