Audacity is a realy good conversion and sound editing tool. It is also my favorite in windows. We used to use an old program from Windows 3x. :D

Rezound better than Audacity, Ardour, GNUsound, Sweep
 

Rezound:
I have spent over 100 hours recording from and creating sound files from dozens of 60 minute Ethical Society tapes.
I liked many attributes of Rezound,
finding it better for my work than Audacity, Ardour,
GNUsound, or Sweep.
I would like to see Rezound have a button to disconnect/reconnect from the sound system, so I could listen to sound files
separately from Rezound without exiting my Rezound edit.
I chose to create *.wav files with Rezound,
then outside Rezound run lame for mp3 files,
run mp3gain to adjust sound,
and finally run kid3 to add tags.
I keep both the *.wav files created for future changes,
and *.mp3 files for use.


Audacity:
when I tried this 2 years ago,
it had visible aberations of lines and fields
not matching where the developer intended
(probably correct on MS Windows, but not on my Debian Linux).
For example, some buttons were chopped.

Ardour:
I spent about 30 hours with Ardour 2 years ago,
but it collapsed too often.
A more complex/flexible setup might justify Ardour,
but I found it required extra work during each use.
For example, I had to get the application "Jack" also running as a daemon.

When you tried it, it was still very early alpha. The final version was released just a few weeks ago.
Ardour/Ardour2 Is one of, if not the one most flexible DAW I've ever used (among Cubase vst32 to SX2, Audacity, Nuendo, Reaper). If you claim it lacks flexibility you should elaborate. Jack is a very powerful soundserver. It would be rather stupid not to build an audio workstation around it, if you're going to write one for linux. I agree that it should start by default when you start Ardour.
But I can think of more complex startup scripts than "qjackctl -s & ardour2" :)