alsa / arecord question

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Greetings fellow Lintards

I'm trying to set up LIRC with IR over the 3.5mm microphone port. It supports this with the alsa_audio driver. I have everything rigged up and when I press a button on my TV remote it goes
remote -> RF receiver -> 3.5mm into computer -> the mic input bar in Ubuntu's pulseaudio sound control panel moves to indicate a signal

However, when I use lircd with the command
lircd --driver=audio_alsa --device=hw:0@44100,r lircd.conf
I get no indication of a signal when using irrecord.

Furthermore, when I run
arecord -d 10 /tmp/test-mic-input.wav
I can clearly hear signal at the exact time I press buttons on my remote.
However, when I run
arecord -d 10 /tmp/test.wav --device hw:0
I get
audio open error: Device or resource busy

This leads me to wonder if hw:0 is simply the wrong device for some reason. What does arecord use by default? Or is there something else I can check here?