Recording and playback are quite different in the Linux world. If you are using ALSA, the best solution I can offer is to reinstall gnome-sound-recorder from source, downloaded from
http://ftp.gnome.org/ online.
I don't prefer using GNOME Sound Recorder. Why not try Audacity, a player/recorder located at
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ which is quite robust. You may spend several hours getting dependencies for it though.