Arduino and Audio

This post is dedicated to research into how best to set up an Arduino environment for audio.

http://interface.khm.de/index.php/lab/experiments/arduino-realtime-audio-processing/

http://www.ladyada.net/make/waveshield/libraryhc.html

As far as I understand it audio can be processed using the Arduino. When I say processed here I just mean ADC and pass to the computer and DAC from the computer and pass to a power amp. The first link above seems to be the way to do this but it seems rather problematic and tedious and the results have a very limited sample rate and depth (for audio) and so are unlikely to provide adequate quality in the long term.

I'm not looking into the possibility of having a dedicated device to perform the conversions and simply using the Arduino as it is designed to be used, to control data. Thinking about it now however even using a dedicated ADCDAC device the Arduino would still need to sample the output from the device and so would impose its crappy sampling rate and depth. Or would it if the audio input to it was in digital form?? The only analogue input would then be the FSR and the arduino is fine for that...questions!!!