Plus, even if a program does run at the same level as the player, slowdowns will occur

And they said while ago on their homepage that player only takes 30% of the cpu power...

The important bit for the player is latency - it must be scheduled really quickly when it's ready to run, or you get a break in the audio. As long as the third-party application doesn't care about scheduling latency, there should be lots of CPU time available.

Borislav