basically, i have a friend, who is not an IT professional but has been a computer hobbyest for years. He has used windows since 3.1, and I just *know* that he would love linux as much as I do, if he would just be willing to devote some time to get over the initial hurdles. One thing he needs is motivation, he is a guitarist who enjoys doing recordings on his pc. he discovered something called powertracks pro, which is basically a multitrack midi sequencer, and it also allows for .wav tracks, if you add the .wavs itll save as .wav, if you dont you can do a .midi, or something along those lines. i have seen him use it, seems like some god awful thing written in vb 5 or 6, but it is extremely feature rich. not professional quality, but a little bit of everything, which i think is one of the things he loves about it.

what i am looking for is high quality linux apps that do similar things. i found one called ardour, which spiked his intrest enough to reinstall mandy, but i need a bigger arsenal of stuff i can tempt him with. also, some info on setting up sound fonts would be very appreciated as well, if he doesnt have a higher quality sound from his midi, he definately wont switch.

last but not least, the man is addicted to gui. now the irony of this is that in my teens, i was a mac addict, he was a dos guy, who was reluctantly drawn into windows. then i spent a year on a windows box, learned most of what there is to know, and promptly switched to linux. now its reversed, he needs a simplistic gui to be happy, while i cant get by without my CLI. what i need is a gui oriented distro that he will be happy with, currently i have him on mandy, but for those of you who have tried stuff like xandrOS, i would like to know if this is the right choice.

currently, i have 6 notches on my belt for windows to linux converts, and 3 people i currently call my neophytes, people who are interested but still in uber-newbie mode. if i can get this guy to switch, it will be my greatest triumph

I have personally used 2. I use them to mix multiple streams and clean up dirty music sources like a radio recording, (both can record of course). Audaciity looks sharp, is easy to use, and does all that you ask. It can load and convert from any format such as .wav, .mp3, .ogg, .midi, etc. You load it, literally cut and paste between OTHER loaded entries and mix. The other one is rezound. It is not quite as polished looking, but MUCH more powerful. The only thing Audacity has that rezound doesn't, which surprises me is a powerful amplify function where you can amplify to max values an entire section/whole song and it won't allow clipping. With rezound, you have to make sure you don't try to amplify too much.

I have used both to create silly CDs where I ask questions, then cut in the responses which are basically the person singing a line in a song. The people I give them to get a kick out of them.

Oh Yeah, I don't use Windows and have ZERO idea of any of their programs capabilities, but both have a cool feature. After recording from the radio or something, if you have a sample of the 'noise' during a lull in the song, or just after/before it starts, you can tell either to use that as the noise reference and SUBSTRACT it from the rest of the song. I have turned some really fuzzy, radio recordings into near CD quality for burning.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
http://rezound.sourceforge.net/

RO

Of course, I need to give soundstudio another try, and there are...you get the idea. Follow this link.
http://linuxshop.ru/linuxbegin/win-lin-soft-en/
Here are the listed contents of sound editors.
1) Glame.
2) Rezound.
3) Sweep.
4) WaveForge.
5) Sox.
6) Audacity.
7) GNUSound.
8) Ecasound.
9) SoundStudio.
10) mhWaveEdit.

thanks for the links, rezound looks real cool

here is a link for the power tracks pro site
http://www.pgmusic.com/powertracks.htm
(screenshots are in the lower lefthand table)

it is more of a mixer then anything else, what he uses it for is to do backup instrumentals for a guitar track.

Audacity is awesome, I have been using it to record some cassettes to my computer and get rid of static and other imperfections in the audio. The result has been some very high-quality WAVs that I can use to create an excellent CD with. There's really nothing bad that I can say about that app, one of the few I absolutely can't live without.

Check this site out:

http://linux-sound.org/

I do a lot of home recording on my PC. It is still one aspect that I haven't had the time to switch over to Linux applications. But after reading that site, I think there will be plenty of comparable applications for Linux that cost considerably less. Now I can actually use the software legally, oops, did I say that out loud.