Second vote for the easy and free awesomeness of Audacity. There are plenty of programs that record simply and easily, the real differences are made with whatever hardware you're recording with.
nah protools is the handiest cause you don't have to keep sliding the start position every time you wanna do a take, you can also make multiple playlists for each audio track meaning shit doesn't get cluttered on top of each other if you wanna do multiple takes of the same line. yeah protools all the way, also audacity doesn't allow active vsts and naturally you'll want a bit of reverb and compression on the vocal track while you're recording so it feels more natural. what are you recording anyway?
thanks for the recs everyone. i'll look into each program once i have a bit of time on my hands, either tomorrow or some time next week. @powellman: well i want to record some tracks with vocals. just vocals and some beats, maybe some synths and some guitar too. some experimentation, i'll see what comes from it.
I think all recording programs are about equally as simple in terms of recording. It's virtually consistent across all DAW's. You set the input device, arm the track, and press record. With that said, Reaper is small in size, runs smoothly, and has a long, free evaluation period. I wouldn't recommend Audacity, simply because the interface is very archaic, and you can't really apply FX that are reversible.
I still think protools is the handiest because of its shortcuts, makes it very easy to do multiple takes and just keep bashing it out til you get it down. Its editing is also far superior to most other DAW's.
