I know I tend to have reletively off-the-wall questions...but I tinker around a lot (and isn't that part of what Linux is about?) and thus come across some strange situations...

Okay. I have a USB Midi controller with which I play music...thing is the drivers for the device are Windows & Mac only.
But with some googling around, I found out that with a good bit of hacking, I can get it to work through ALSA...
So, as I decided to do a clean install of Libranet (my distro of choice...a Debian-derivative...) on my desktop a few days ago, I grabbed the Libranet support created script to insall ALSA in order to build the Alsa modules and be able to use my MIDI controller...
...unfortunately, Libranet doesn't "offically" support ALSA, otherwise I'd pose this question to my 1-year support that I got along with the distro...

Now, the screwed up part...

Even though I have ALSA on my system, it there a way to set up ALSA so that the core ALSA modules will autoload on boot (via the /etc/init.d/alsa script) and yet still have my SoundBlaster Live! sound card play via the kernel OSS drivers...
...thing is, Gnome 2.2, Mplayer, and an oodle of other apps just really aren't happy with my choice of Alsa (esd doesn't jive with it, Mplayer eats nearly twice as much RAM as without Alsa, XMMS skips a bunch with the Alsa output...)
...as I'm typing this, I'm getting a few new ideas that I'll try when I get home from work, but if anyone else has an idea (or has done this before) I would appreciate the input...

System specs are as follows:
AMD Duron 800 on an Asus (or is it Abit...) motherboard.
768 megs of PC133 SDRAM
3 Maxtor HDD (1 100 gig, 1 36 gig, 1 20 gig)
NetGear 10/100 PCI NIC (tulip driver)
Belkin Prism2 PCI WiFi card (tinkering with HostAP)
SIIG ATA/66 Controller (Highpoint 366 chipset)
Soundblaster Live! Value
nVidia GeForce4 Ti4200
...and an oodle of USB devices...

Running on a slightly modified 2.4.20 kernel (SuSE splashscreen and Zaurus USBDNET driver support...) and pretty synced up with Debian Sid...