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I don't get the fuzz about Audacity: It's a simple tool for recording stuff quickly from line-in and cropping/normalizing/de-noising/converting audio files. That's it. If you need more, you probably want a multi-track editor anyway. Jokosher f.e. is free.

Yes, I use audacity for most of my sample work, with a little SoX for the tedious stuff (like adding a bit of silence to the beginning of a bunch of recordings) and conversion to more obscure bit depths and frequencies. Before that, I used Cool Edit 96 :). Audacity is really good at doing what I need it to do.

Tomaes + linde, I actually only use Audacity for sample editing. In linux I used to prefer sweep, which was lighter and faster to work with, but audacity's ubiquity makes it good for me: whether on osx, windows or linux I use the same software and that's it, job done.

It has lots of UI flaws unfortunately. I wish it actually focused more on simple sample editing. Its multitrack stuff for example has never worked for me -- too clunky --

I fire Ardour when I want to go multitrack.

we must give some awards to the audacity authors! they managed to build an extremely simple app and still give it a UI which almost rivals Gimp's one!

For crossdeveloping Atari demos I find these costless apps useful:

- Xcode IDE (you need an account to download though)
- VBCC/VASM/VLINK for building
- lz77
- ACE Tracker
- Milky Tracker
- Hatari
- Grafx2
- UPX
- The Gimp
- Studio Son
- Screenspain
- maxYMiser
- Musicmon
- Toolame

Unfortenly some tools I use are not free, such as Soundtrack Pro, Photoshop, NeoN and Lightwave. Gotta learn Blender and Wings3D a bit better I guess..

On the other hand, Ardour's UI is actually pretty good (and better than protools' I hear, although I also hear that protools as a putrid UI)

PSP7. Ah... Those were the days. :'|
For simple shit I now use Paint.Net, though development goes slow there. For bigger stuff I use Photoshop CS3. The GIMP UI sucks mayor ass, sorry.

I try to use free/OSS software where I can:
- VS 2008 Express (C++/C#)
- DevKitPro / GCC / Programmers Notepad
- PSPad
- NASM
- IDA Pro (4.9 is free) / HxD
- VirtualDub / Avidemux
- Audacity
- KDiff
- Tortoise SVN/Hg/Git
- Paint.Net / IcoFx

Imo for 95% of your stuff you don't necessarily need commercial tools any more. There's lots of free software that does just what you need. Though maybe not as quick or comfortable as the commercial version...

It seems to me that all of the good freeware audio programs are either scene created or scene related. That is, they would only of use and would only make sense to sceners. (ie: trackers, filesize-conscious-softsynths).

Making brief comparisons between commercial daws/synths and freeware stuff, it's really hard to even but them side by side at all. I sometimes wish that freeware developers would stop trying to play the "catch up game", and do what only freeware developers are capable of - make programs that are completely unusual and unexpected (you know, like demos).

I suppose GIMP could catch up Photoshop one day, and Ardour could catch up to Cubase eventually, but who cares? We already have Photoshop and Cubase.

(And in response to the initial post, if anyone wants something as bloated as visual studio express, but not visual studio express, Borland offers free versions of Turbo Delphi, and C++ builder, circa 2006)

http://www.turboexplorer.com/