ALSA/Asterisk Driver Customisation Urgent

Urgently require someone who is really familiar with ALSA and soundcard/channel drivers. We currently have a multi-channel soundcard running on a Linux machine, all is configured and working fine. We are also running an Asterisk telephony system, which uses a console/soundcard driver (chan_alsa) to send output to the soundcard via Alsa. Number of things we need to try and fix, 1. Asterisk hogs the soundcard when it loads the channel driver. If possible we want to try and see if can customise chan_alsa to not block or lock the card so its free to use in other applications. [login to view URL] other issue we have is that we need to try and configure/optimise the period size, frame size and buffer size for either the ALSA devices or via chan_alsa, as currently we are using the plughw plugin from Asterisk to ALSA, and its causing some jitter/issues and such, Kinda hard to explain, but if anyone has good knowledge about ALSA/sound driver programming you are welcomed to try and take a look, Can pay for some consultancy as well, urgently need to fix the buffer issues and such, Thanks,