Hello, thanks for reading my first post. Now to the point!

I'm a musician, so sound recording is kind of a necessary for me, and I am a geek, so I finally saw the light and disposed of Windows XP about a week ago, replacing it with the glorious Debian Sarge.

Now, I love Linux so far, but I know virtually nothing about it at this point. Through trial, error, and Google I have gotten almost everything up to speed for my needs. Almost.

I have no problem playing sound, but I am having serious issues recording it, which is kind of bad since I'm supposed to be recording an amateur CD for my girlfriend for Valentine's Day, which is... too soon, since my sound recording is not working.

Here's the deal: I have several programs on here that I'd like to be able to use. Mainly Ardour and Rosegarden, but Audacity also for quick ideas (and because it's familiar ground, since I used it while under the influence of Windows).

Using Synaptic, I've set up all of the packages and dependencies surrounding ALSA and JACK, as far as I know.

Now for my problems: When I record a track in Audacity, everything goes just fine until I try to record a second track, which records in a really strange way and sounds horrible and distorted and a little bit like it tried to swallow Tux. That would not be related or even a big deal if I could get Ardour and Rosegarden up and running.

However, when I try to start Ardour, it tells me this: Ardour could not connect to JACK, either because JACK is not running, because another user (possibly root) is running JACK, or because there is already another client named 'ardour'.

I'm pretty sure it's option A, because I've tried to get JACK to run (both from the terminal and with qjackctl) and it either just ignores me, or says it could not open ALSA sequencer as a client and that the MIDI patchbay will not be available. The little 'Messages' window that qjackctl has tells me this:

13:57:52.978 Patchbay deactivated.
13:57:53.110 Statistics reset.
13:57:53.158 Could not open ALSA sequencer as a client. MIDI patchbay will be not available.
ALSA lib seq_hw.c:446snd_seq_hw_open) open /dev/snd/seq failed: No such file or directory

I'll be truthful with all of you: I'm not an idiot, but I am also not a programmer, and won't be for a while. Not until I get used to Linux. So I don't really know what that means, and if I did, I wouldn't know how to fix it. (Honestly, I was proud of myself when I successfully set up a program from a source code tarball)

When I try to run Rosegarden, it tells me it can't run the Rosegarden sequencer.

Now, I'm guessing that my main problem lies with ALSA, which I understand is hell to get working properly sometimes. I hope that if I fix that, JACK will just sort of sort itself out, but thanks to Murphy's law, things are never that simple.

So I apologize for the long post, but I hope that I've given enough detail that somebody can help me out here.

Thanks!