Kencaz suggests RTFM. Fine but what? I am trying to find my way around the sound software and what with arts, esd, kscd, alsamixer, krec, kmix, arecord, what have you I need a comprehensive guide. Is there a well-written and accurate document?
For example the audacity tutorial says plug mic input into the mic port and everything else into Line in but that won't work for me. As above I can get sound from the speakers but not record. If I plug into the mic port I can record but the record level is too low. kmix has a 20db boost but alsamixer doesn't. It's just a mess.
[Debian lenny, on board sound NVidia CK804, Realtek chipset]

Here's how I got recording to work with line-in:

I used kmix to fiddle with the mixer settings. The settings called "line-in" only seemed to effect how/if it played in the speakers, not the recording.

The red circle under "Capture" needed to be activated (although the position of the slider seemed to make no difference.)

The slider labelled "AC97" set the volume level of the recording (Though it didn't seem to matter if the red circle below it was activated or not.)

Thanks for the advice. Unfortunately I have now given up on the on-board 'card' and installed a Creative Audigy SE. I recompiled alsa to get the driver for the ca0106 and so it would be a lot of trouble to get the on-board driver working again. With the SE card removed I just get 'no cards found'. I gather, though, that getting the Audigy SE working properly is likely to be very difficult so I may have to go back. Whatever happens I'll bear in mind what you say about kmix. The help on kmix is very good.

Hey all I'v had the same problem for a while trying to record line-in but not getting anything. Thanks to ax11 I played with alsamixer and got it to work.
So using 'alsamixer' I switched to [Capture] view, then selected the following CAPTURE devices by pressing the 'space' key
<Line> and <Capture> Setting the volume on these to full.
Then using <AC97> to control the recording level volume.
It now works in Audacity....yay.

I'm experiencing the same problem a lot of other here are. I can hear sound through the mic but can't record it, despite hours of adjusting setting in alsamixer.

I also noticed that the samples I was getting were ABSOLUTELY nothing. Like not even 1 bits worth of noise. This leads me to suspect that the alsa driver isn't actually reading the sample data from the ADC. I also seem to be missing any controls for the AC97 chip/thing.. I'm I supposed to have some? There are also three IEC958 switches that appear particularly useless. If anyone could enlighten me to what they do I would be hugely thankful..

This is on thinkpad t21.. with slackware 12. and a 2.6.25 kernel. The cs46xx driver also still fails on suspend/resume... Just like it did 4 years ago on my X600. These problems with the alsa driver have lately had me looking at the FreeBSD website. This really sucks!! I've be devout to Linux since 1992.. but my latest experiences have been really disappointing. Sorry for the rant..

Tim.

I'm sorry to hear you are having difficulty. As for me I expected that the Audigy SE would be difficult and it was. I discarded it and installed a Terratec Aureon (which has the CM8738 chipset) and this is fine. I still have some problems with ALSA so to record from audio tape or LP disc I am using gramofile, which I think uses OSS rather than ALSA (why should I care?). This is delightful software: records, rips, de-scratches and plays back. KSCD plays CD disks except that the volume control slider doesn't work but you can adjust the volume with kmix. I still think the whole sound thing is a mess.

This worked for me, thank you! I've spent days trying to solve this problem and kmix did it. For some reason, in linux mint/ubuntu, the gnome audio controls couldn't enable capture with the T22 soundcard. kmix did it, which I think is a KDE controller strangely. Thanks for all the work guys!

Jmo

I agree kmix works well. As for ALSA I gave up on that and I now record my LPs with gramofile and OSS.