Replacement for mplayer?

I'm looking for a replacement for mplayer. mplayer is a audio player for the console. It works just fine when I use it like so:

 mplayer /path/to/audio.mp3

But when I start it in the background I get this error message:

 :~$ mplayer /home/.alarm-sounds/alien1.wav & [3] 15451 :~$ MPlayer svn r34540 (Ubuntu), built with gcc-4.7 (C) 2000-2012 MPlayer Team mplayer: could not connect to socket mplayer: No such file or directory Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.

I'm trying to write a little alarm script because I want to practice some modified version of pomodoro.