An actual Linux question

[Matt Graham]

So a few weeks ago, I bought Rock Band, which comes with a USB
microphone.  I thought I'd use try to hook this USB microphone up
to my Gentoo box and record some sound.  This is apparently a lot
harder than it should be.

The device is recognized according to the output from lsusb.  The
snd-usb-audio module is loaded.  "arecord -l" shows the device.  A
device file corresponding to the mic is present under /dev/sound/ .
However, nothing I tried got any sound from the mic into a file.
"arecord -D" with multiple syntaxes (/dev/sound/pcmC0D3* , 0:1 , and
things like that) got me cryptic error messages.  I can reproduce
these later, when I'm sitting down with the hardware.

So, how do people with USB audio gear get sound input into files?
Does it require tinkering with ALSA's config file in some poorly
documented way?  (ALSA's documentation is in a pretty sorry state,
if you want to do anything complex.)  Is there something with
arecord that I'm missing?  This is only the second time in 9 years
working with Linux that I've actually wanted to record something
from a mic... and with OSS and a borrowed non-USB mic back in 2000,
it was really easy (set mixer up, use sox to read from /dev/dsp).
Technology marches on, I guess.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see