<a href="http://darkness.codefu.org/wordpress/2007/12/15/292" source="darkness">Audio in Linux is awesome</a> document's one man's journey to being able to edit an MP3 file under Linux. Included are the following gems: <ul> Look at the Ardour interface. Decide that (1) it’s not what I want, and (2) dear god that is ugly. Is that Tk? Motif? Holy hell. Run away. Read http://jackaudio.org/faq. <iq>The simplest, and least-secure way to provide real-time privileges is running jackd as root. This has the disadvantage of also requiring all of JACK clients to run as root.</iq> Yeah, no. </ul> One commenter suggested that the author would have had things much easier had he just installed a multimedia-capable Linux distribution in the first place or was willing to install the multimedia packages of a Debian-based distribution (which apparently is more involved than the typical <c>apt-get install...</c> command). Yeah! No. To that, the astute Steve commented: <bq author="Comment by Steve">While I’ve been using Linux since the beginning, these people advising multimedia Linux are not on this planet. You’re advising that someone should wipe their whole machine and install a complete new operating system just to tidy up some sound files. Please, recognise when your love of Linux is making you say stupid things, and stop doing it.</bq> Well played, sir. Good advice for many situations; simply replace [Linux] with [Mac], [Java] or some other arduously-defended technology.