HOWTO: Stop Audacity from being a bastard

I used to have a little script called "audacity_start.sh" which disables Enlightened Sound Daemon, waits 2 seconds, then starts Audacity. This made Audacity behave nicely-ish with Gnome.

But this approach no longer works - something is hogging the sound anyway, so Audacity can't grab control.

I tried using the old esound-clients and the esddsp command to reroute Audacity's IO through ESD, but that caused a segfault.

I just found the alsa-oss package and the aoss program. So all I have to do is run:

aoss audacity

And Audacity will behave nicely. Granted, ESD itself will not work while aoss is working its magic, but other programs will still work fine.