Sound hardware consists of VIA 8235 & AC97 chips on Gigabyte mobo
The software includes: kernel-2.6.10-1.770_FC2 with alsa driver snd-via82xx alsa-lib-1.0.3a-2, alsa-utils-1.03-1, kdebase-3.2.2-8.FC2.i386, kdelibs-3.2.2-12.FC2 kdemultimedia-3.2.2-2.i386
Gnome-sound-recorder functionality was discovered while exploring KDE desktop popup menu items and their submenus. Key to the discovery was a KDE application named Multimedia Systems Selector reached by K/Red Hat icon --> Preferences --> More Preferences --> Multimedia Systems Selector which displays a dialogue box labeled "GStreamer Preferences". Within the dialogue box, one can display a menu of choices for Audio - Default Sink and a Test button. Originally set on ALSA, clicking on Test produced no sound. Four other alternatives were presented - Arts sound daemon, Enlightenment sound daemon, Open Sound Software, and Custom. Test button results were positive for the first three of those alternatives, but only OSS played nice with Gnome-sound-recorder.
Efforts to record voice messages with Gnome-sound-recorder produced nothing more than popping noises. However, gnome-sound-recorder did record music played from a CD-rom. Recording worked when the type of file to be recorded was set to "Voice" and to "CD quality, lossless."
FWIW