While looking for an esound replacement I came upon this: www.pulseaudio.org.

I get horrible results with esound, despite using a 3GHz dual-core
Pentium D.  Even with no CPU-intensive tasks running, sometimes it
"skips", etc.

This looks promising.  I'm going to play around with it later; perhaps
this should be part of the NetBSD GNOME effort?

-Blair