Crippling loss of music

I am one of those people that uses music to set the tempo of my workflow. If I am suddenly without the ability to listen to music at the office I have a much more difficult time focusing my efforts.

The forces of nature seem to be mocking my efforts to listen to music. My Sony MDR V700's developed the characteristic crack in the swivel joint that happens to most of the long term users, so cant use those to listen. My el cheapo logitech headset got damaged when it got caught up in my leg when i moved away from the desk, the cable got ripped out of the end of it. My Logitech USB headset is working in ubuntu, but i'm having a hard time getting the system to output to it instead of the Audigy 2 sound card that's inside the PC. Unless an app explicitly sets this as it's output source, i have problems.

And forget my favorite music service, Pandora.com which uses a Flash based player. I believe it outputs via OSS, which is picked up by Alsa using emulation. I'm not sure what card is set by default as the recipient for that emulation. I would rather the OSS go into the Enlightened Sound Daemon that's running on this system, so I could have finer grained control on what output it went to.