Anyone know of a good alternative that does NOT require JACK and messing about with JACK?

no -- i think the only question is can someone help me learn how to use jack

JACK is amazing... what kind of problems are you having with it?

i'm pulling a total brain-fart, and can't think of any studio recording software at the moment... but most software should have ALSA support as well. stick with JACK if you can, though. It's really easy if you install the qjackctl program (a graphical interface to configuring just about every aspect of JACK.)

Also, if dual-booting is a possibility for you, I recommend DeMuDi (part of the AGNULA project.) It's a debian-based distro that's sole purpose is audio creation. It has just about every audio tool you can think of, and JACK works just fine with it. I wouldn't use it as my main distro though, you need root privledges for a lot of the software to work properly, as far as I know.

Well I installed programs like audacity and hydrogen and all I needed to do was install them then they ran great, but I tried getting soundgarden and muse and a few other ones but they seem to do nothing but complain about the lack of JACK - so i checked out the JACK website and the GUI for JACK too, I mean I know Im not that technical a person, but the intstructions for it appear to be written in binary code because I cant understand what the hell Im meant to be doing, I mean what I dont understand is if thye can make audacity and hydrogen run without all this complication, why do these other programs need JACK?
I mean I installed JACK, I got the GUI for JACK, I read and tried as hard as I could to understand the instructions for JACK which are really and truly IMPOSSIBLE to understand, and 9 hours later Im still not getting any music done.
JACK seems to be a very troublesome fellow, I would love to find a program that would do the job that ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with JACK.

though we can't understand the trouble with jack (which is being used because it is the best and Linux standard for sound applications interoperation and not that hard to figure out)

versions of MUSE before 0.7 that is <0.7 can use alsa as sound output and can function without jack
the developer stopped support for both because everybody uses jack and maintaining both backends was a HUGE pain.

later we can show you how to use jack but you will need to give us "this is what i tried" and "this is what happened" one of the points of confusion like for all Linux software is there are many different approaches to using jack -- the easiest i have found is to run qjackctl using the utility "sudo" and run muse the same way. They just work then no more trouble than that.

Okay
What I tried was first of all I checked I had jack installed, and it was there, so then I installed the gui interface for it, but now I am not sure what to do, when I open muse it still says it cannot connect to jack

When you're in the JACK gui (I'm assuming you got qjackctl) did you click the 'Start' button? This actually starts the JACK server allowing software to connect to it.

If that's been done, try clicking the 'Connect' button, which should bring up a display of playback devices and software connecting to the JACK server. You can use this to manually connect services as well.

I tried doing that, but muse still says that it cannot connect to it, as it doenst have permissions

first thing is to give us exact error messages

ok -- like i said before
get sudo working so you can type
sudo xterm
and you get an xterm that says (root) (just a test of sudo you don't actually need the root xterm so you can close it afterwards)
this will take a line in your /etc/sudoers file like
i know that seems insecure but for now since you are having trouble it's a place to start
you can make it more fine grained for just the programms you need later if you want.
then open up a regular user terminal and type
sudo qjackctl
then push the start button
if it doesn't start show us the message output
then in another terminal type
sudo muse
if it doesn't start copy paste error output

after you get it working add the sudo part of the command to your menu

But wouldnt that be insecure running these programs as root?

it seems bizarre to me the idea that someone while your machine is online somehow it's going to infect it with a proccess
through some type of exploit in a server of something
that does nothing but set around and wait till you fire up muse (while you are off line) then try to run an exploit aimed at a muse buffer or something -- that would be like a worm that plays a melicious midi song or something ??
"evil music with hidden executable messages"
a music oriented trojan horse
just seems a little far fetched to me.

What really seems like a security threat is to patch you kernel so you DONT have to run them as root -- that give all processes like xinetd and your web browser and you mail server and such access to memory locking and rtc clock intrupts ! just so you don't have to run jack and muse as root.

these programs are beta and experimental so sometimes rarely they do screw stuff up and you have to reboot and this would be the case if you run them as root or not. User level processes can screw the stack just like root processes. The real question like i said earlier is melicious code imbedded in the overruns and there just is none.
the other day i lost acces to my serial ports for instance i assume a buffer overun. reboot argh.
Nothing is ever harmed permanently here at my house and i use these things with sudo alot.

the real danger of root is from the user typing stuff like "rm -R /"
i mean it isn't like these programs function on the net with open server ports or anything.
so for instance just think alittle and don't save a music file and call it /usr/sbin/modprobe or something.