someone tell me if this is possible

[Uranium23567]

Why would you want to run this non-blocking? The system will buffer keyboard input, so each call to read a character will get the next one in the input buffer. From what I see, your script should do what you want already. So, what's the problem, exactly?

the problem is poor reponsiveness (you can also ignore the "delay" in the script I posted above, that dosen't make much difference)

it won't capture the next key till the wav from the previous key gets through playing

[Rubberman]

Well, you could run $playcommand in the background, as in:

#!/bin/bash
while read -n1 char; do
	playcommand="aplay --duration=1 "$char".wav"
	$playcommand &
done

That will allow the script to grab the next character while playing the previous one.

[Uranium23567]

I will try this, thank you! my dev system is at work right now, so we'll see monday