Troubles w/ gnome-cd-recorder

[Vaughn Treude]

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