i record with audacity (
www.audacity.sourceforge.com) which is free and can be downloaded from that site. very basic and simple for recording. also free but less simple is Kristal (
http://www.kreatives.org/kristal/index.php?section=news). this is modeled after a protools or cubase type multitrack recording program. advantages of kristal is it writes directly to wave (as the other not so free programs do as well) which audacity does not. This is a good thing to have incase your computer crashes, youll still have a recording up till that point. (audacity writes to a proprietary format which cannot be recreated after a crash, but with the newest version i havent had a single crash so i still trust audacity.)
as far as post production type stuff, i switch to Adobe Audition (formerly known as Cool Edit Pro) which costs about 150 (but i
hear that it can be downloaded for free on something called torrent sites
). i use audition for fade in/outs and resampling and dithering (24/96->16/44.1).
from there, i load the files into CDWav (
http://etree.org/cdwave.html) which almost everyone here uses for tracking. very simple and also free. the newest version can export directly to FLAC which is a great tool as well. i always track the 16 bit files first and then save the cue sheets and use them to track the 24 bit afterwards (16 first so that they are split on sector boundaries for CD burning).
from there its all pretty much software that anyone whos traded shows digitally should know already.
also, i have a variety of other audio applications on here (2 cubases, some other free stuff) but i rarely use any of it other than audacity and audition. just like to stick with what i know, but i keep the others around incase something goes wrong in the other 2.
good luck, hope that helped. +t for laptop taping :-)