Recording sound from microphone

[Daniel Klein <bringa@gmx.at>]

Hey all,

I want to record sound from microphone. I am trying to use Audacity, but 
the rec program from sox would be cool as well.

Here's what I did, back when I was running SuSE:

I brought up KMix, selected microphone as input source, muted it (so 
there'd be no echo over speakers/headphones), started record (curses 
based recording proggy) and went ahead. Worked fine.

Now, doing the same stuff and using rec/audacity, I get no signal from 
the microphone. In Audacity I can even select the input device, so I 
select mic there on top of having it selected as input source in either 
KMix or Alsamixer (I've tried both). I know the mic is working because 
if I unmute it, I can hear my voice coming out of the speakers (and I 
can create wonderful feedback sounds, tried that one out a lot! :P) If I 
turn the mic up, unmute it and select mix as source, everything works 
just fine (cept for the fact that anything else that's playing while I'm 
recording also shows up - not good). So I would like to exclude hardware 
failure (besides, it's absolutely the same system that used to work 
before I dumped SuSE and went for debian - a step I have surely not 
regretted at all so far.. apt-get alone would make me want to stay here 
even if I had to give up a kidney).

I am using a Terratec XFire 1024 card (CS46xx chip), alsa 1.0.5, using 
kernel 2.6.6 and everything else is from unstable as well. Any help 
would be greatly appreciated.

Daniel