freebsd sound system

[rasz]

hi,
i have a a couple of general questions with regards to freebsd sound and 
midi but i am
not sure what kind of development is underway that might make this sort 
of redundunt.

anyhow, i am only just starting to get a bit into programming and 
understanding
 different areas of freebsd when i have the time; and the only thing i am
 really missing in freebsd is midi ; but hopefully  that will come about.

besides that, i have run into a couple of issues which concern alsa, 
particularly with two applications so far.
one was a linux binary (renoise) which complained about missing 
files/libs on first run, but got past that after i installed
the alsa libs port (it failed on something else after, but that's 
another story).

the other program was rosegarden which i downloaded as source and tried 
to build following the included instructions,
however it does some checks to see if alsa (or what version) is 
installed. so after first fail, i commented out that part from the 
makefile to see what happens, which only produced a fail later on.

so for the long run, my real question is this; would it be possible, and 
how easy is it, to have some kind of dummy alsa package installed? or is 
that a bad idea? it wouldn't need to be functional, just present for any 
application that requires it to build or install, since eventually it 
seems that these apps can use jack in any case, which in turn would be 
using whatever is actually available.

on another note, does anyone know how old or active the info on the 
following site is?   

http://wiki.freebsd.org/soundsystem


rgds