I personally prefer the ease of use of FL Studios. You don't need a MIDI keyboard to make music in it, and it's relatively simple to learn (just takes a bit of exploring).
Pleanty of the above are nice and dandy, but the hands down 'best' program would be Cool Edit Pro, its the photoshop of music software (and the price is usually $2000).
Unfortunately you need a degree almost to know how to use it properly, its expensive, and there aren't many non-infected torrents of it.
If you're just getting into the creation of music, Audacity will give you a nice taste of things you can do, and its free / really simple. Once it feels limiting, you can try out FL/Cakewalk/Acidpro/Reason.
I recently found a chiptune maker called Pxtone, which is kinda crap but a bit fun, and you can steal all the .wav files which is good if you want to make old video game styled music.
Pleanty of the above are nice and dandy, but the hands down 'best' program would be Cool Edit Pro, its the photoshop of music software (and the price is usually $2000).
I'm just saying it is the 'best', and is used by many of the pro's, but its not a beginning stepping stone, and ultimately won't make anything you create better if you aren't that good in the first place. Many of the other programs mentioned above are better.
And honestly guys, audacity is a piece of crap ~ its free and I have no idea, or interest in knowing how they make money, and working with wavs/mp3s and editing the sound wave itself will hurt you in the end if you need to un-do things, and are not saving many versions of the same thing.
I use FL myself so I would endorse it Squll2, its very user friendly.
I am working on getting access to the old news portal under a different URL for those that would rather use that for news before we get a different news view.
It is OK though for the main page to open up on the forum in the view it was before. As long as the portal has its own URL so it can be viewed that way I do want to try it as a regular forum view for a while
I switched it to a "Standard" article forum. This will show the thread list like normal, but the threads themselves will have the first post set up above the rest of the "comments"
I would like to see it again like Ghan had it the first time with pagination though - without the pagination that view will not work but with pagination it just might...