sound recording with built in mic? (Ti550)

[Jennifer Landefeld]

Hi all,

I feel I'm missing something obvious regarding sound input on my Ti550.

I can see under Sound>Input that the microphone is adequately picking 
up my voice but, for the life of me, I cannot figure any way to do a 
simple recording of spoken word (ideally to save in MP3 format for 
playback on my iPod).

If nothing is available for *free* as part of the OS I'd appreciate the 
most inexpensive suggestions that produce reasonably listenable 
results. While I thoroughly enjoy high quality recordings of my music I 
just plunked down the $$ for the 30gig iPod and that has stifled any 
additional major purchases right now. (-:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article2.html?artnum=58448 <--- this article 
shows an old version of the sound panel that actually allowed 
recording. If this isn't something doable now in the OS can I use 
iMovie to *just* record sound and produce an MP3 track of what I want 
to read in for playback?

I'm on OS 10.2.6 - no 3rd party OS stuff to speak of (just the standard 
major apps for the most part).

TIA,
Jenn