Mandriva 2007: I had sound quality problems for ages. I eventually reduced the line-in setting in kmix & it worked. The level you set it at affects the volume of the sound in media players.

Before using audacity to record with, in kmix I had to set the line's green button on, the headphone & front buttons yellow, the capture & the mixer buttons to red. I could then record, but the recording had a loud background screech, so I used Mandriva's basic sound recorder. The audacity rpm is an OSS version. There is an audacity alsa version which people can download & compile.

I had problems compiling anything including lame & would get an error like "no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH". If you look in the Mandriva control centre, you'll see its list of software. In the development section, in "C", there is a file called gcc(tick it) which you need installed from the dvd. In the "Other" section is "make" which is needed too.

I foresee a problem: there is an online radio interview which will probably take longer than its 1 hour time slot, so what they do is to offer it as an mp3 archive(David Icke at www.towardthelight.org on 21Oct 07 10PM British summer time, 9PM GMT. More interviews at www.newsforthesoul.com/icke.htm). So I need to download the second half of it. If you have this problem, use your downloader software/tab to download a small bit of it, close it, use the appropriate software to edit a similar file so it takes up half the volume of the file you want, swap this for the first & rename it, then you can continue the download! If it's an mp3 it has to be the same bit rate.

(www.newsforthesoul.com/icke.htm needs Realplayer. Download this from www.real.com/linux 5Mb. It can stream mp3 & can display how long the audio lasts. Rename it to realp.bin Open a console in the file manager(e.g. konqueror) in the folder with realplayer, type: su Press Return. Then your password. Type
chmod a+x realp.bin (case sensitive)
./realp.bin (start install)
specify directory: /usr/local/realplayer

It's then in the multimedia part of start menu.)

Really?
Everything from that site is playing back fine for me- I'm using mplayer plugin for Firefox, and kmplayer for Konqueror. Both are streaming and playing back EVERYTHING from that site just great.
Factly, I have not touched Real Player with a fourty yard pole since I was a total newb (quite a few years ago, that is). Mplayer, xine plus win32codecs, or vlc natively, will play back everything that is within the range of Real Player... so I do not see why someone would ever bother about this odd player.
Heck, even Foobar2000 via wine is WAY a better option than Real Player!
The only interesting thing about Real/Helix is their MP3 encoder, which is stunningly fast (2-3 times faster than Lame), and should be a good choice for speech or lo-fi music encodings. The bad thing is that the sound quality is at the very best questionable (full of artifacts), so this isn't a serious solution for real digital music encoding...