Forget "Freeware" go GPL, that way you don't have to worry about the companies who make freeware and shareware and trialware stealing your creativity.
Glame is targeted to be the GIMP for audio processing. Glame supports non destructive multitrack editing, recording and mixing; realtime effects using native or LADSPA plugins; OSS, ALSA or SGI audio and WAV, Mp3 and Ogg file formats http://glame.sourceforge.net/index.var
Recreation is intended to be a simple script that provides "one-touch" operations for recording and editing audio files and then archiving those files, locally or remotely, and burning audio CDs.
License: GNU General Public License (GPL) http://recreation.sourceforge.net/
*btw: none of these work in Windows, for that your stuck with audacity (which isn't bad, I don't know why you don't like it!) it requires Linux to do really awesome music editing.