Sound recording can be done the same way I described it last year, but Mepis might fool you. Mepis comes with Krecord, which I have not figured out yet. The older program, Krec, is much simpler and works as it always has. Because Krecord did not work for me, I was fooled into thinking that recording did not work on several of my systems for months.
There have been improvements to ALSA and there are all sorts of good new sound tools that I have not tried out yet. Normalize, looks like it can solve the problem of different recording levels from different sources. There are programs that automate phonograph recording, which I have yet to try but will soon now that I have gotten over the Krecord/Krec trick.