Ok, so with a little reading I found a way to test the driver for sound recording, and it works for both line in and the mic: dd bs=8k count=4 < /dev/audio > sample.au cat sample.au > /dev/audio So now my problem is to get 'alsa' and 'krec' to get the data from the audio devices to a file. I'm working with Mandrake 10.1, 2.6.8 kernel, KDE 3.2.