Old SB Live cards should certainly be cheap to pick up second-hand; they certainly have hardware acceleration and multi-channel support. (Sadly somebody already got mine, though.) Be wary of the newer SB Audigy Foo cards, though, since I think Creative have been reticent about releasing any sane specs for Linux driver authors. This page is your friend.
I suspect you might actually find that Linux will do soft-mixing by default for less-capable sound chips these days. IIRC the ALSA guys were careful not to force software mixing (a la Windows) on in the kernel so as not to impose latency on people with decent hardware. Lately, however, it enables software mixing in the userspace libraries by default (where you can turn it off if you're doing Crazy Audio Stuff). Hence even my on-board AC97/Azalia chips are perfectly happy to play multiple streams simultaneously.
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oneplusme.livejournal.com at 09:11am on 27/10/2008![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I suspect you might actually find that Linux will do soft-mixing by default for less-capable sound chips these days. IIRC the ALSA guys were careful not to force software mixing (a la Windows) on in the kernel so as not to impose latency on people with decent hardware. Lately, however, it enables software mixing in the userspace libraries by default (where you can turn it off if you're doing Crazy Audio Stuff). Hence even my on-board AC97/Azalia chips are perfectly happy to play multiple streams simultaneously.