using a microphone
 

Hi, I just plugged a regular mic to the back of my snd card. I would like to be able to use the microphone but I don't know how?
What applications are you using? When I try to record with the sound recorder from Gnome, it simply does nothing. Any ideas?

start a mixer program, like gmix, xmix, smix, etc., and set the recording source to mic.

For programs, I love Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/), works good, and it can encode to mp3, I transferred a bunch of stuff that was on my mini-disc player using it.