John Brezak is doing a complete rewrite of the SB driver decomposed into
sayers, that permits a clean separation of MIDI and codec, and seems to
point into quite distinct cards well (he's using PSS, I've been playing
with PAS-16)

Short term, there was a problem with the stock NetBSD sb driver that 
it used the wrong select call in conf.c and I found once that was fixed
the cat file > /dev/audio worked well. 

I have never seen recording work. the PAS-16 manual and inline comments
in the code suggests there are very silly aspects to PC sound hardware.

I'd suggest givin John a little more breathing space to get his experimental
driver up-to-speed before attempting a complete rewrite or munging linux
code in.

Please also consider the Multicast! there's deployed code out there that
expects certain behaviour of /dev/audio different to people playing .WAV
files...

-George