Audio - shoes/shoes3 GitHub Wiki
Shoes used to have portaudio (and the bloopsaphone gem). Portaudio on Linux may exist but it may not be linked to modern a/v subsystems like pulseaudio. It's time has passed. (FYI, It's worse on osx from a Shoes perspective).
What we could do is put together a very simple Shoes api/player based on the NSSound class of OSX. For Linux we could implement the api via Gstreamer. Windows could use portaudio or gstreamer or something else. While Gstreamer has a large set of features and capabilities the goal is not to replace VLC - just a simple sudio api.