DeMuDi is the Debian Music Distribution, and you can get an installable ISO of it from the Agnula Project.
It installed well on my Acer laptop, and yes, the sound setup was great out of the box, including recording.
Jack is installed and runs automagically on startup and there’s a widget to configure how applications interact with each other — all easy to use and graphical.
Every Linux audio app I’ve ever heard of and a number I haven’t are available precompiled. Alas, two of my favorite, Ardour and Freewheeling, proved rather crashy. I fear I may need more memory on that beast before it’s really happy.
But I had hella fun playing around with ZynAddSubFx, the most gorgeous software synth EVAR. Serious, you’ve got to believe me, it comes installed (at least on DeMuDi) with many dozens of fascinating sound presets, and it’s so damn rich you feel like you’re Rick Freaking Wakeman on his $10,000 synthesizer or something.
Oh, I plugged in my PC-300 USB piano keyboard and it autodetected it right out of the box.
I threw together this piece of nonsense by plunking around on the keyboard with one of the cool sounds. OK, the pitch bend in there sounds pretty stupid. I just wanted to try it, give me a break. :)
Anyway, the few crashy apps make the Baby Linus cry, but overall it’s the *best* experience I’ve ever had with Linux sound, ever ever ever ever. I was blown away. So much goodness… free… on a CD.
I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to play with Linux sound and who knows their way around Linux at least a bit. You may have to teach yourself a little Jack-fu, but it’s pretty easy to grasp.