Steve Fosdick fozzy@pelvoux.demon.co.uk writes:

I remember someone from the user group mentioning that he was interested in music applications for Linux but despite looking back over the last few months of mailing list archives I haven't discovered who.

I am, but more from sound tracking and editing. I've just built "Snd", which is a simple wave editor and mixer now ported to GTK and scriptable. It seems quite good so far, if not the easiest to use. Guess I ought to read the manual ;-) http://ccrma-www.stanford.edu/CCRMA/Software/snd/snd.html

Sorry, so I can't really help with your other questions, other than suggesting http://www.linuxsound.at/ as a starting point.