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Meh, I never "got into the whole podcast thing" but I did listen to lugradio religiously. Figuratively PMSL at most of the episodes and the earlier shows did tend toward being amateurish but definitely improved over time. IIRC, it also sparked the development of Jokosher

Actually, the world of free software has Jokosher, which is inspired by GarageBand, and to me seems as easy to use. Still at an early stage, but I recommend taking note of it! Note that it's actually not JACK-based, which would make it so much easier for new users (the crowd usually drawn to GarageBand) to get into. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, Jokosher could be bundled into free operating system distributions, making them a nice alternative to Apple computers.

I also recommend Qtractor, which is more full-featured, but still not as intimidating as a full-blown DAW.

But, I must say, being a heavy user, that I feel that Ardour has come a long way in usability in that last two years, and these days it's almost as easy to use as all the above. It's not hard to get productive with it fairly quickly. If you gotta learn a piece of software in order to produce music, I would recommend Ardour right now. It can start you small, and take you very high up in features. Ardour's huge problem right now (if you ask me) is it's outdated and paltry documentation.

That said -- I fully agree with your statement that audio production on free software is not ready for self-congratulation. It's immensely powerful (there's nothing quite like JACK in the proprietary world, and there are some truly astounding LADSPA effects) but it's hardly rock solid, and definitely a mess.

As a UI Designer, let me say I really doubt this. There just simply aren't the incentives for a designer to work on OSS as there are for a developer.

You might look at the history of Jokosher, for insights on how to build a project where coders aren't king. No, it's not a game, but it at least entertainment related.

Also Jokosher ( http://www.jokosher.org/ ) is on the verges of having a stable release, for people that use a Gnome based system and want something as simple and easy as Garageband then it could be just the thing if Ardour and some of the others are too much like Darth's Vador's bathroom.

(BTW, I have no association with any of these projects).

Applications like Jokosher have far more accessible interfaces, even after such a short time. I'm not a developer on Jokosher, but I have a need to use audiorecording apps.

http://jokosher.org/

Jokosher is described as "Audio production made simple".

Based on gstreamer and an attempt to make something that is much easier than Ardour to get in to (not as complex, and never will be). A music editing and mixing software targeted for garage bands and hobby podcasters and the like. 0.2 are more or less 1.0, which will be released any week now (when the gstreamer multi input soundcard bugs are taken care of). Will support Jack and such...

Unfortunately, the update feature seems to turned off on this release. Grrr...