sox may be a faster route to get the raw output into something more usable: http://grangerx.wordpress.com/2009/0...parec-and-sox/

Not sure if its been packaged for freemantle yet either, but both sox and ecasound would be quite useful on the n900.

The internal mic is not half bad, I tried using it to record some guitar (using ecasound in my chroot) fiddling yesterday, and was pleasently surprised.