Voice Recorder for 14.04

You can very simply record audio through terminal using the pre-installed tool arecord.

1. Open a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T)

2. Run the command

   arecord filename.wav
   

3. Your audio recording has started, press Ctrl+C to stop the recording.

4. Your voice recording has been saved as filename.wav in your home directory.

EDIT:
If you have multiple inputs you can find them using

arecord -l

which will list hardware devices that can then be selected using the -D flag. Listing looks like...

**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC269VB Analog [ALC269VB Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

When choosing a particular device I used the following to select a USB headset.

arecord -D hw:1,0 -f S16_LE filename.wav    

Note that the device selection was based on the following listing which comes straight from the -l listing.

card 1: Headset [HP Digital Stereo Headset], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Try Audio Recorder.

Audio Recorder is a recording program, that allows user to record audio from various sources, and allows you to save recording in various formats.

To install, just press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open Terminal. When it opens, run the command(s) below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:osmoma/audio-recorder
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install audio-recorder

For Ubuntu versions higher than 15.10 there is a new ppa which can be found at https://launchpad.net/~audio-recorder/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:audio-recorder/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install audio-recorder

Make sure your microphone is connected to your computer and well configured. Run this command: alsamixer to check your microphone level.

Also you can use sox to record your voice, it can be installed from the Ubuntu Software Center, r install it from the terminal with this command:

sudo apt-get install sox

Edit

You can also look at Ardour.

Ardour is a powerful digital audio workstation that gives you everything you need to record, edit, mix, and arrange professional audio.^Ardour

To download, and more info, check out their website

Other programs to look at are MHWaveEdit, and KWave

I always prefer shell commandline, I use below command to record voice:

avconv -f pulse -i default /home/$USER/Music/$(date +"%m%d%Y_%H%M%S_$HOSTNAME")_screencast.wav

to stop it press q

UPDATE:

Ubuntu switched to FFMPEG again as of Ubuntu 15.04 "Vivid Vervet"

The above command will continue to work by replacing avconv with ffmpeg

ffmpeg -f pulse -i default /home/$USER/Music/$(date +"%m%d%Y_%H%M%S_$HOSTNAME")_screencast.wav

Another one to look for is gnome-sound-recorder, it was added in 2014. It is simple and just records input from the mic.

It is packaged 16.04 in the universe repo (named gnome-sound-recorder).