ALSA audio and YouTube

Question

I want to play youtube videos and programmatically direct firefox's audio out to a particular sound card.

I think I would do something like firefox | aplay -D hw:x,y. Yields:

Playing raw data 'stdin' : Unsigned 8 bit, Rate 8000 Hz, Mono aplay: set_params:1059: Sample format non available Available formats: - S16_LE

Trying firefox | aplay -D hw:1,0 -f S16_LE -c 2

Playing raw data 'stdin' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 8000 Hz, Stereo Warning: rate is not accurate (requested = 8000Hz, got = 44100Hz) please, try the plug plugin

Finally, firefox | aplay -D plughw:1,0 -f S16_LE -c 2

Playing raw data 'stdin' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 8000 Hz, Stereo

The command-line suggests that it worked, but audio came out of hw:0,0 (the default).

Do I need to make my own plugin? Or do I need to force alsa to take 44100Hz?

Also, I refuse to use pulse since the memory leak bug makes it crash often.