This may crack you up, or take you by surprise, but the only program I use for my music is Garageband. It's a free music making program you get with macs. It's full of loops and samples and stuff like that, but it's great (once you learn to manipulate it) for making all sorts of programmed music.
But I'm EXTREMELY happy with what it's capable of for recording live. All the stuff on here (minus the two electronic songs) are just me plugging in for guitars and mics.
It's a simple program, nothing top-of-the-line or in depth.
If you need a hand or advice or anything about recording though, let me know, I'd be glad to help (with the little bit of knowledge I have)
Well BND I.T. Practitioner is a British National Diploma course in the area of computing, it studies pretty much everything to do with computers including programming, ASD, Hardware, Multimedia, Web Design, Business, System Analysis and a lot more.
oh well.
=]