Looking over at the KXStudio news I see this feature bullet.
"armhf and arm64 are now supported targets, taking Raspberry Pi 3 as the minimum specs. With this, the repos will support 32 and 64bit Intel-based architecture, plus 32 and 64bit ARM."
So I guess that Carla might be a viable way to get a sample player working on a Raspberry Pi. I've used Carla as a VSTi in REAPER for Linux before and it played all my SF2/SFZ files fine.
I will have to look deeper into this new support for Raspberry Pi that FalkTX is now saying exists.