Audio: Line In Gain

[Michael A. Peters]

Motherboard: Asus A7N8X Deluxe (I think ac97 0SS i810_audio)

I've recently started using my sound card to record stuff.

I have a shell script that uses rawrec, sox, and lame that is called by
the crontab to record radio shows I like that are on while I'm at
school, and I also am using Audacity to digitize and de-noise cassette
recording of myself and my Spanish vocabulary homework (so I can make
mp3 CD's of that and learn while sleep and on the bus to school)

Anyway - the input gain is easy to set in Audacity, but for my script -
it has to be pre-set in the Volume Control utility.

The problem is something (either rebooting or audacity when I record the
tapes of myself) keeps jacking up the input gain, resulting in poor
quality recordings of the radio show if I don't remember to check the
setting before I leave for school.

Is there a quick non interactive CLI way I can set the gain on line-in
so that my shell script can set it to the proper level before it starts
recording?

Thanks.