[linux-audio-user] Simple sound recording

OK, here is what I want to do: 1) Take my linux laptop (now with Fedora core 1) and connect a signal to the line-in jack and record audio to the laptop hard drive. Ideally I would like to do something like generate an mp3 file to save hard drive space. The goal here is to record conference speakers and generate a CD containing MP3 files of a days worth of people speaking. (Using something like MP3 is not essential, but would save space on the hard drive). Since all I am after is decent vocal audibility, I don't need exquisite audio. I will be getting a feed from a mixer. My laptop is a Toshiba Tecra 8100, which has a Yamaha YMF-744B (supposedly this was supported under ALSA 0.5.8) 2) What I have done so far ... (apart from just get bewildered by all the audio jargon under linux -- there is OSS, ALSA, JACK, ... maybe that is most of what I have tripped over so far) Find fedora RPM's of the alsa stuff (vintage 1.0.2) and load them onto the laptop. Read stuff on the ALSA site and linux-sound.org (which I am still doing). I was playing yesterday on my desktop system -- I installed a Sound Blaster Live card and had it playing a CD using the OSS drivers, now I will see if it still works with the ALSA drivers. I couldn't get gnome-sound-recorder to do anything, but maybe it will work with the ALSA drivers. I am looking at an application called qarecord (I like it since it has level meters -- I want to see something move when I squak into a microphone and the gnome recorder seems to have nothing like this), I have got the source, but will have to build it. So what am I asking? Any help and pointers -- I don't want to make this unduly complicated. I wish I could just hook up a signal source bring up a GUI, click on record and have a .wav file coming out of stdout that I could pipe to some compression tool. Surely one of you out there has done this -- my goal was to test fly this Wednesday night, but so far I am a day and 1/2 into this and am just getting deeper and deeper without seeing progress towards my goal. Thanks for anyone who has the time to offer some help. Tom -- Tom Trebisky MMT Observatory University of Arizona -- Tucson tom(a)mmto.org