I was trying to test my motherboard's microphone input yesterday and only found the utterly unintelligible krec app that could (supposedly) record sound. Never was able to figure out what combination of sticks I needed to poke it with, so I installed audacity-nonfree from livna. Audacity has the preferred recording device set by default to "OSS: /dev/dsp", which actually could record sound, but when I played it back, iitt wwaass rreeaallyy ssllooww :-). Acts like it was gathering samples at one rate, but audacity thought it was some completely different rate. There are three other devices listed in the preferences with names like "ALSA: gibberish", and trying them eventually led me to one that seemed to work correctly. So, is this a bug in the OSS emulation under ALSA? Or just some feature of the insanely complex audio system I don't understand (there is, after all, only the one sound chip on the motherboard, so how that became 4 devices in audacity, I don't know). When krec was initially driving me crazy, I tried booting XP on this machine, and the sound recorder app "just worked" when I said record from microphone, so at least I knew it was possible for the microphone to work :-).
