What is the pulseaudio way of recording?

[Paulo Cavalcanti]

Hi,

I have been recording using arecord and aplay this way:

arecord -D default -d 0 -f cd | aplay -f cd -D default &

The problem is that, while this works fine on rhel5, the same is no true
for Fedora 12 using pulseaudio, since I clearly hear some random noise
(specially at low volumes).

Maybe this is related to the fact that the arecord process is consuming 15%
of my CPU (a quadcore, 2.4MHz). Compared to Audacious 2.2, for instance,
playing an mp3 file, which consumes only 4% of the CPU, this is really too
much.

I concluded that the problem has to do with recording with pulseaudio
active.
I know there are parecord and paplay, but they are just symbolic links to
pacat,
and I do not know how to combine them in a similar way.

Therefore, my question is what is the best way of recording with pulseadio,
without wasting too much of my CPU and without noise?

Thanks.

-- 
Paulo Roma Cavalcanti
LCG - UFRJ