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/