> I know this comes up every so often...but what is the status?
> 
> I was hoping that with the release of 1.3 there would be some mention of 
> improved audio capabilities for the i386 platform but I haven't seen 
> anything.

I quote from the release notes:

        The audio subsystems have been substantially debugged and
        improved, and now offer substantial emulation of the OSS audio
        interface, thus providing the ability to cleanly run emulated
        Linux and FreeBSD versions of sound intensive programs.

What this means is that you can now get high quality sound with
the most common sound cards.  The OSS emulation mode is good enough
to use programs like the RealAudio player and Quake.

If you are looking for MIDI support you have to wait until the next
release.

        -- Lennart