
Oh I have been on various Linux access list, even the Debian one for almost a decade. However at some point one requires in person help and it has taken me a very long time to find a group where that might be possible. I am thrilled to learn my sound card should be supported though. Such is one of the terrific things about Linux in general. I owe what I know about the ability for ssh telnet into the box to access lists, the talent though can only be managed locally if that makes sense. Thanks, Kare On Fri, 11 Dec 2015, Christopher Browne wrote:
As Lennart observes, yes, indeed, Linux rarely removes drivers for old hardware, mainly when there is something broken about the driver that makes it troublesome to continue to fix it
I took a peek at Linux kernels going into the moderately distant past, and the M-Audio Audiophile 2496 is based on a chipset called "Envy24" or "ICE1712", and there is a fairly sizable list of PCI sound cards using that hardware, which points to it being reasonable to expect it to be supported for a good while. I see support in both latest (4.4) and pretty old (3.18) kernels, all using a kernel module called snd-ice1712.
Loui Chang's suggestions of audio tools like ffmpeg, mplayer, flac, metaflac, lame, mutagen seem likely to be helpful. Unfortunately, a lot of the literature on sound tools points towards friendly graphical tools that won't be friendly at all to anyone having difficulty seeing the screen.
I suspect that this is enough of a specialty area that it may be necessary to look to a topic-related group rather than a geographically oriented group.
One mailing list I can point to offhand that seems likely to be relevant is debian-accessibility, which is the place where discussions take place for accessibility-related issues on Debian. https://lists.debian.org/debian-accessibility/