Problems with vlc 0.2.80

[Stephan Assmus]

>Upto release
>vlc-0.2.73, one could simply say "artsshell suspend; vlc ..." since
>vlc immediately opened the sound device and blocked it. In the
>new release, vlc does open the sound device only when needed,
>such that the "artsd" might again have grabbed the sound device
>in the meantime (e.g. because you have sounds for window manager
>actions enabled such as a window popping up, or changing the
>focus to another window). Since the sound device might still be
>buzzy (then artsshell returns "2"), I use the while loop. At least
>for me, it works well.

Jeez. You Linux guys definitely have some serious OS design problems! 
There is no _single_ audio_server running, that applications can 
register sound outputs with and have the server mix it automatically?!?

-Stephan