I wanted to record a conference call for a colleague who couldn't make it. Normally I'd cheat and run Wireshark to capture and dump an unencrypted VOIP stream, but for various reasons that wasn't an easy option and Skype was going to work better for the call. But how to record it? IRC suggested various ALSA magic options, which looked like they'd do the trick if I could only understand the fine manual. It actually turned out to be much easier than it looked. I dropped:

pcm.fileout {
	type file;
	slave {
		pcm "hw:0"
	}
	file "/home/noodles/pcmout";
	format "raw";
}

into .asoundrc, restarted Skype and told it to use the fileout device for audio out. That led to a pcmout file being created, as well as the sound going to the sound card.

sox -r 44100 -s -2 -c 2 -t raw pcmout -t wav foo.wav then converted that file into a WAV that could be played back. For some reason setting format to wav in the ALSA config resulted in an error - throwing sox at the problem was the easy answer but I suspect that step could be eliminated with some more doc reading.