The current issue of the Linux Weekly News (http://lwn.net/Articles/185613/) features a short article about Polypaudio (http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/polypaudio/). (The article is not (yet) accessible for free, come back in a week if you aren’t an LWN subscriber.)

Quoting:

With its support for a wide variety of popular audio utilities, actively developed code, and broad capabilities, the Polypaudio project fills an important role in Linux-based audio development.