Comment 22 for bug 61211

Please try some lower-level access to your soundcard (I suppose that gnome-sound-recorder goes over ESD?), by running "speaker-test" (http://linux.die.net/man/1/speaker-test):

speaker-test -c 2
(This should output some white noise on your left/right speaker) if this works, please try also:

speaker-test -c 2 -Ddefault
(this should use the "default" alias for your soundcard)

In case the above tests didn't work, please try to manually set the "default" alias in .asoundrc.asoundconf:

# Make a backup of .asoundrc:
cp .asoundrc.asoundconf .asoundrc.asoundconf.bak

# Overwrite it with the following content:
!defaults.pcm.card rev20
defaults.ctl.card rev20
defaults.pcm.device 0
defaults.pcm.subdevice -1