I recently got hold of a Guitar Hero controller for my PS3 but the game still had some time to come so I tried it out on my laptop with Frets on Fire (rather FoFix). But when I started it, it was crashing with some weird error about not being able to open mixer devices. Searching on the google, I came to know this is happening because of Pulse Audio as this application needs direct access to the sound devices and finally I came upon **pasuspender. **This little tool allows you to do that with ease. Just run it in the following way:
pasuspender -- ./FretsOnFire
And it will start working just fine. You can use the same trick for any other application that needs direct access to the sound devices. What pasuspender does is that it will suspend pulse audio and allow the application to access them directly and when the application is terminated, normal functioning will resume.