Hi thanks for your suggestions on simple apps for simple people... ardour, um, sorry to be silly, but how does ecasound tell me whether my mixer levels are suitable for recording the input? don't i need something like a VU meter, ..or? file ? gosh i really wasn't clear. i'm not sure what you are suggesting, but, well, i think i'm doing that. but i need to do a bit of editing along the way. Matthijs: thanks! it has the functionality of x-fades which is really nice, and audacity doesn't. but... hmmm... whats this about large sound files... what happens?? <worries about spending hours to have it swept and mangled> Alexandre: i tried. it sounds perfect, but... hmmm can't yet get it to compile. it depends on a lot a lot of libs that are >versions than mine. i am still struggling (debian woody/unstable) so i'm still open for suggestions for a VU meter, or even some smart way that makes my recording levels easy to assess... Now this is a vsound (0.5) problem I've had for a while. It occurs on realmedia files. Somewhen during the stream realplayer just closes. This is what it says: cygnus:~/mars> vsound --timing -f output.wav realplay _1790918_blur_beagle_vi.ram About to start the application. The output will not be available until the application exits. /usr/bin/vsound: line 163: 1366 Aborted LD_PRELOAD="$pkglibdir/libvsound.so" "$@" Any suggestions? thanks! jane