My fulfilled Christmas Wish was a focusrite scarlett audio interface, comes with Ableton Live Lite 11, a condensator mic and headphones, all for about 200 EUR.
(btw, it's great fun to blast your singing voice through a Marshall amp emulator plug-in)
While Ableton Live is mostly EDM oriented, you can of course use it for live recording of music that requires actual skill as well.
If one isn't into recording own performances, that might not be a very sensible way of acquiring a full-blown DAW, but what I get out of that package is absolutely worth it (and also frustrating or eye opening (still not sure about that) to see that I play better licks on the computer keyboard as MIDI input than with various kinds of guitars I am practising for more than 20 years now...)
I've tested mashing up hypno with audacity a year ago or so, and if keeping the timing of tracks aligned being such a nerve-wrecking micromanagement task is what "linearity" implies, then I'm pretty sure it'd be much easier to finally create my very own perfect personal pantyhose brainwashing with the new tools.
I'm using audacity. For recording and for processing. Have had a look at several other solutions, but...
Yeah, it has its flaws, but at the end its especially as a free software a very versatile and usable tool.
Ardour is 100% free, you pay for the compiled binary but if you are on Linux just get it from your distro's repository.
I have been using it for years (from around 2004) and just finished a quick mix for somebody who needed a quick recording of a song he's doing. Never paid a cent for it (Sorry Ardour dev...). I used it on Red Hat, Ubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Arch, Endeaver OS, Mint, ...
The initial step to get started is a bit higher dan Audacity but the capabilities are endless.
On Linux there is no Ableton but Reaper works, there is Stargate DAW and a few others but there really is no competition to Ardour for multi track recording. If your genre depends heavily on loops you should look elsewhere but for everything else: Ardour.
