I use audacity for recording. With the additional plugins installed you
could save as a wav/mp3/ogg. It has a lot of cool features and it's
pretty stable. I use it all the time. I'm not sure how to fix your
mixer, what I did when that happen to me was open the Alsa mixer,
enabled everything and started messing with turning on/off stuff.
Eventually i got it. 

Hope this helps.

On Wed, 2007-08-08 at 03:30 -0700, Vaughn Treude wrote:
> Excuse me for the repost, I messed up the subject line.  Must have had a 
> senior moment.
> Vaughn
> 
> Vaughn Treude wrote:
> > I'll continue in the sound-related vein.
> > I've got Centos 4.4 on my Sony Vaio notebook.  I'm try to record analog 
> > audio from the microphone jack.  The program that came with this distro, 
> > gnome-sound-recorder version 2.8.0, is the buggiest Linux program I've 
> > seen in a long time.  The time slider doesn't move, it won't show any 
> > information (channels, etc.) about the file, and I can't save the file 
> > once it's recorded.  It doesn't seem to allow me to record in WAV 
> > format, rather than FLAC, whatever that is.  Worse still, after I 
> > fiddled with it for about 15 minutes, it suddenly STOPPED recording and 
> > now records only silence.  It may have been because I was messing with 
> > the mixer settings; does anyone know how to set them back to the default 
> > value?
> > Another odd symptom: the sound, as piped in from the microphone and out 
> > through the headphone jack, now sounds distorted, and yet I've backed 
> > off all the levels, and everything on the mixer looks reasonable.  And I 
> > have brought the computer completely down and back up.  I wonder if I 
> > may have somehow damaged the hardware.  The input, which I was using 
> > just for test purposes, was from the headphone jack of a portable music 
> > player, so I wouldn't expect it to have caused problems.
> > After this I tried the command-line "arecord" program and it won't 
> > record anything either, probably because I've completely hosed my mixer 
> > settings.
> > Once again, how does a person reset the mixer?  And can anyone recommend 
> > a better program?
> > Thanks!
> > Vaughn Treude
> > 
> 
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