Trying to make some mad techno music and the last piece of the puzzle I need is a cubase alternative, this is where my problems are starting -

I donwloaded rosegarden which seems to run well, but it doesnt seem to be able to import or export wav files, is this right or am I missing something??

Next I tried out Ardour and Muse, and with both of these Im having the same problem - they wont seem to function to something called JACK
I made sure JACK (whatever it is!) is installed and it is and I even installed the GUI for it too, then I start muse and it says -

no soundcard avaialble or soundcard not yet configured, this is all very confusing and Ardour does much the same thing, is there a really easy way to get this working that involves as little work as possible?

Any of the sites I have looked on seem so technical and long winded that I am very close to giving up on these programs, which would be a shame as they both seem very good.

Thanks for yoour help,

Jack is a sound "hub". You have to start it in order to launch ardour. Ardour do only audio now (midi seems to be planned after the 1.0 release).
Look at this:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=316772

jack is a sound server (think of it like a patch bay) and you need it running and it needs to be root
unless you made a special kernel
the apps connecting to jack also need root access
my suggestion is to use the program "sudo" to give all these apps root access
example start qjackctl with "sudo qjackctl"
(rosegarden will not work this way)
like all things Linux jack it is very powerfull and can do many things
much more possibilities than using windows but that also means it's harder to learn

you can pipe from one program to the other through jack to record your midi as a wave

Isnt it true though that running jack and the applications as root could be a security risk?
I read this somewhere.....

True. But when you do music, you don't browse the web , so you can shut down net.