Charles Linart wrote: 
Just because you're ignorant about a function doesn't mean it's
unimportant.  Also, "You don't need that feature, it sucks anyway"
followed by a rant about how successful music sucks, is an evasion,
not a real argument, even if you did know what the hell you were
talking about.
Obviously I agree with the point Rob is making here, but it's important not to let that get mixed up with personal attacks.

Successful music?  What's that?  You mean commercial music?  By my
definition of success (sounding good) it is a complete and total
failure in most cases.  Now hear out my "argument":

Music is a human experience, and mechanizing it to the extent that
it's mechanized today in commercial studios dehumanizes it; therefore,
commercial music sucks.  You may disagree, but maybe my ears are just
better attuned than yours to the clocklike monotony of what you call
"successful" music.

But that is not a good argument for ignoring features that many people want. In effect you are saying that everyone should make music the way you do it. No wonder Rob feels so offended. I used to know someone who had opted to learn the flute at school in the early seventies. When he told his flute teacher at his first lesson that he wanted to be able to play like Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, the teacher fired him. Since then music has become more eclectic, less class-ridden and less judgemental, and that is certainly a good thing. Certainly a lot of commercial music is pretty dull, but amongst all the dross within any particular genre there are always some gems, if only you are willing to look for them.

And please don't tell me what kind of ears I have.

Many good songs are completely ruined by overproduction.  The best
artists out there are still doing it live-to-tape, and Linux is just
fine for that sort of thing.
If the best artists are doing it live to tape, why are you using a computer? Of course if your needs do not include sequencers then you are very well catered for by Ardour (and will be even better catered for once VST support is implemented). And certainly overproduction has ruined many potentially great projects. However I would not agree that all the best artists are doing it live to tape. Many ground-breaking artists, from Edgard Varèse and Conlon Nancarrow to Tangerine Dream and DAF, have assumed radically different ways of working for reasons that are creatively and conceptually sound (although I freely admit that Tangerine Dream has also used sequencers to produce some dreadful schmaltz). Speaking for myself, I want groove quantise partly for conceptual reasons—pastiche is an important aspect of my work—but mainly because my "skills" as a musician are completely inadequate for implementing the ideas I have. So please let's ditch the judgements about other people's abilities and tastes. And let's ditch the flaming.

As for "quantizing the groove," open-source programs have many, many
ways of doing that based on the description from the Cakewalk website,
even if they don't have a cool marketing slogan for it.  Maybe we
should call it "phreaking the matrix" in the OSS audio world.
Please tell me more. I've been looking for these tools and I haven't been able to find them. I will gladly give them a try if they are fairly simple to use and integrate reasonably well with my work flow. As for the term "groove quantise", it has attained fairly wide acceptance. It's use is not limited to Cakewalk users.

Robert