@larand ..And I omitted ALSA in my brief history of Linux sound :/
It was sniffles with a slight cough.
I had a lot of experience fighting Linux and sound since I used to stream to a Internet radio station with Linux. Did the occasional blues set and sometimes rambled. Sidekick used to do an entire show of her own. Good times. Wrote a QT/KDE front-end to the darkice encoder that allowed music to stream from a variety of sources and be faded in and out with the microphone input.