I have spent quite some time recently playing with audio on my ubuntu desktop.
Last time I tried Audio on linux I found it to be a sorely disappointing affair. That was some 6 to 12 months ago.
On my old Windows box I had an E-mu 1820, but when I bought it I didn’t know that Creative didn’t like to help out by open sourcing their drivers. (How many people have bought M-Audio cards now, knowing that they can get Open Source drivers for it!) On my old Windows box I thought that card was going to stay, until week before last…
I had had some recent successes with getting jack and pulseaudio playing nicely. I had had a play with Ardour and loved it. So I bit the bullet and gave it a go.
I now have glorious multi channel playback and recording via my E-mu audiodock, so I have taken the opportunity to throw together a few recordings of my poetry. The first couple were straight recordings with a bit of reverberation added for ambience.
The most recent is a full on four and a half minutes of sequenced sound and samples 
If you are viewing this on the site you’ll see the above links as little embedded mp3 players, courtesy of the very smart wpaudio plugin.