Recording The Soundcard Output

I have been looking for a couple of days for a way to record the output of my speakers directly to a file i.e. record what I hear. An easy good quality solution was one I found here. Since I modified it slightly to suit my own system, I thought I'd document it both for myself and others.I am using an Ubuntu Itrepid based system which has been modified to use ALSA as the sound architecture. This