>  [ Please
>  [ keep us informed of programs and/or procedures for directly
>  [ generating and capturing audio samples without involving audio tape.

This should be possible to do without any special hardware or software.
Most soundcards have the possibility to record sound from the output of
their mixer. You may have to turn this feature on, or adjust the levels in
the Mixer control panel. I'm absolutely positive about this with the
Soundblaster boards.

However, given the rather poor quality of the cheap soundcards I would
recommend to use a software synthesis program, like the beforementioned
Wavmaker (there is another similar one on the Net, I don't remember the
name however). The advantage of these is that the sound quality could be
far superior to the plastic sounding simple FM or poor wavetable synthesis
(in principle, I don't know any of these programs well).

Zoltan