Hi! If I'm not too far wrong; Turn the mic up as high as it goes, without being in the red zone. Thus you capture even relatively low sounds and have a max range. See that your room doesn't contain disturbing noises, like computer-humming and other stuff. Make sure your mic isn't too noisy. About plugins: If you have a regular alsa installed, and I don't know why you wouldn't, then you have all you need here. Exceptions: You can't really store soundfiles on disk with your app, then you'd need the file-plugin, but I believe it's still included in alsa, if that's not the case, you need to install alsa-plugins package from your distro. The rest you'd need would simply be for editing. Mostly ladspa/lv2 plugins and other software to denoise, compress/expand, filter... HTH. Kindest regards Julien -------- Music was my first love and it will be my last (John Miles) ======== FIND MY WEB-PROJECT AT: ======== http://ltsb.sourceforge.net the Linux TextBased Studio guide ======= AND MY PERSONAL PAGES AT: ======= http://www.juliencoder.de