Recording sound on Suse10.0

Hi all. I've got a m4a sound file file that amorak plays ok. I wanted to convert this file to mp3 or wav. So I thought an easy way would be to play the file and use krec/krecorder or audacity and save the file recordered. However, trying input as mic, line, line1 etc, I get a file with no sound on it. Running suse 10.0 opensource, packman and guru sources available. amd2500, 512 mem, soundblaster 5.1. System uptodate. amorak using xine sound engine due to a recent update which removed helix and gstreamer. Peter C