How to create artificial microphone input in Linux?

I'm working on an audio recognition project.

For testing, I'd like to be able to have a program:

• load audio data from a file
• provide it to the Linux kernel, as if it were coming from a microphone
• have any user-space program sampling the microphone be obtaining data sourced from my file.

Is that possible in Linux without having开发者_运维技巧 to write a new kernel module?

EDIT: i guess that solution won't work .. but see my comment below.

this shoud be simple under linux.

here are the steps:

1. make a named pipe with mkfifo (mkfifo ~/audio_out.pipe)
2. cat the audiofile into this pipe (cat test.wav > ~/audio_out.pipe)
3. get the program you want to listen, to get input from this pipe. maybe you have to make a symlink for programs not flexible enough to read from any device.

I hope I got your question right.