Specifying the order of sound devices

[Lee Revell]

I was wondering what the recommended way to set the order of sound
devices is in Ubuntu.  For example a user needs their USB headset to
always be the first device and the onboard sound to be the second, for
the sake of (broken) apps that can only talk to /dev/dsp.  But, if the
machine is booted with the USB device unplugged, the onboard soundcard
binds to /dev/dsp.  Or, a user has 3 USB audio devices and needs them to
be bound in the same order every time.

It seems that udev should be able to handle this but I don't see any way
for humans to configure it ;-)  It's a real pain because every distro
does it differently and none of them seem to have an easy way.

Does this still require editing a bunch of config files?

Lee