Audacity is an excellent free audio recorder and editor. Extremely popular, many editors have found it useful in regards to the WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia. Here's a quick and dirty guide on how to configure it for the Wikiproject.

Changing the OGG Quality

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By default, Audacity records in 96kpbs. This is a waste if it's above 48kpbs though, so go to Edit -> Preferences -> File Formats and move the OGG Quality slider to 3. This will record in 48kbps.

Sample Rate

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Go to the very same preferences screen, but click on the Quality pane. Set the first drop-down box to 44100hz.

Mono

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To set the sound file to work in Mono, go to the Audio I/O pane of the preferences screen. On the second "Recording" drop down box, select 1 (Mono.)

That should do it!