I know this post is almost 3 month old, but I found a few programs that seem pretty good and anyone who stumbles across this post might find them worthwhile to check out.
My favorite one I've found so far is Reaper which can be found at
http://www.reaper.fmIt comes with a ton of plugins bundled with the software, and still manages to be a very small download (like 4mb it think)
It's not free unfortunately but the price isn't too bad when compared to other software like ProTools, and Cubase. I think it's like $60 for the discounted license (at least at the time of this writing) and according to their website the discounted license is for individuals using Reaper for personal use or commercial use as long as your yearly gross revenue doesn't exceed $20,000. Otherwise the commercial license is $225.
But the cool thing about this program is that it's not crippleware, that is, it doesn't expire after 30 days like most non-free programs do. You can continue to use the program well after the 30 day trial period and it will still work normally (except for the fact that it will remind you you're 30 day trial is up and you should buy it).
I think it's somewhere around version 3.1 at the moment, but when I tried it I wasn't to thrilled with it, but luckily they also offer the old versions available for download at their website
here, I prefer version 2.58 myself, it runs the best on my older computer.
Another program I came across when I was looking for a free DAW was Traverso, which you can get at
http://traverso-daw.org/. I think it's still kinda in development, but the cool thing is, like Audacity, it's free and licensed under the
GNU GPL. Also cool is that it's available for Windows, Mac, and GNU/Linux.
Like I said above though it's still in development, when I used it I recorded a track and then went back and recorded another track, but on playback the two were out of sync. I emailed the developers about this and they said they were working on it. But that was like a year ago so maybe it's fixed now. I haven't used it since then, I've been using Reaper, but I still really liked the layout and how it wasn't as cluttered as some other programs I've used (n-Track comes to mind).
The last program I found was Kristal which can be found here:
http://www.kreatives.org/kristal/index.phpI found this at the same time that I found Reaper and my cousin used it to record some guitar tracks and send them over the internet to a friend to record some vocal tracks.
It's pretty good too, I found it really easy to use and work with, plus it's also a small download, something like 3.5mb. It has some limitations though, it can only record up to 16 Tracks and it has no MIDI support. But it is free (not GPL though) and 16 tracks is nothing to turn your nose at, I wish it would have been around a few years ago when the only free program I could find was Audacity, and Quartz which only offered 4 tracks and didn't run very good on my computer anyway (ProTools Free never worked on my computer then either so I never got to try it
)
So anyway, there you go, hopefully you'll find one of these programs useful, I've used Audacity before too, and as an audio editor I think it's excellent, but as a multitrack DAW it's a bit lacking, especially with the weird way that it saves projects.
