FC3 wishlist - sound server

[Jonathan Andrews]

Kernel people, pretty please... why not rewrite /dev/dsp to be a virtual
device ?

If the virtual device owned the real device - say at the fastest
playback and record rates then emulated instances of the device for each
process that wanted to open it - mixing together the results to give a
common output. It must be possible W2K does something similar:-) and it
had as much baggage to carry forward.

http://www.opensound.com/virtmix.html

Something like this but transparent with just a single /dev/dsp. 

I know this isn't as simple as it sounds, but it does fix a lot of sound
problems, including allowing multiple incompatible sound servers on the
same machine.

Jon