[LAU] Noob needs help using jack

First of all, I'm a complete noob and might need help in more than one way. I am helping someone who is conducting a research. For this, she will be making dozens of phone interviews, for which I'm using google voice. Shee needs to play sounds to the guests/interviewed persons (using vlc or audacious) and I need to record everything that is going on; the conversation and the playback. Some of the recordings will also be used for a video and broadcasted in a radio show. I used to have have ubuntu 10.04 with stereo mix setup so I could do this easily and used to record using audacity (that is why she came to me). But I tried to do the same in linux mint and all I did was mess up my audio in such ways that just did not make sense anymore. In rage I decided to kill mint and use ubuntu studio but I'm having basically the same issues and JACK aint no piece of cake. I beg you guys, please give me a hand on this as I'm breaking whatever little is left of my already insufficient brain. We might also need to, while recording, play sounds from youtube. I understand JACK is way more advanced than pulse, but I don't mid the latter as I've already used it it before with acceptable results. So help is accepted in any of the two solutions pulse or jack. There are plenty of tutorials about pulse but none has worked for me so far, and saying jack's documentation is scarce is minimizing the issue. Thanks In Advanced!!!