Networked sound - any ideas?

[Jonathan Matthews <jaycee.removeifnotspam@jaycee.uklinux.net>]

Hi all.

I've got a few machines on the internal LAN that I'd like to network the 
sound on.

Only one of them is connected to the hi-fi, but they all have sound 
cards in.

I've had a look at Esound and ARTS, but never had any luck with 
implementing a system-wide solution that my non-techie partner can "just 
use" by changing the hi-fi amp input selector to aux and firing up xmms.

So - does anyone have any ideas and/or suggestions and/or experience 
with this sort of thing?

Any help much appreciated, but if we're talking preferences, then I'd 
like it to be multi-user safe so that when two clients use it then it 
mixes the sound OR drops one silently on the floor - no "force the 
second client to hang until we can get a lock" problems.

And finally, if it were possible to keep traffic low, that'd be nice. 
None of the clients really has the horse-power to encode high-quality 
oggs in realtime, but I imagine that there's a "just try to /halve/ the 
bandwidth - don't work /too/ hard" option out there somewhere ...

Anything, anyone?

Cheers!
  jc