Having searched the net for hours, I still cannot find any tutorials or intro-material for someone new to sound programming in Linux. Can anyone tip me of such a place?

Things that would be valuable for a newbie:
 - Introduction to various ways of storing audio; float vs integer representation, bit depth issues, etc. 
 - Introduction to using standard libraries such as libsndfile and libsamplerate.
 - How to programatically convert 24 bit sound files to 16 bit files

The *only* audio programming introductions I could find was about ALSA and OSS.
Trying to directly use the APIs is very frustrating when one doesn't have a high-level understanding of what goes on ...

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Carl-Erik Kopseng