Lately I've been spending some time futzing around with AudioMulch, a music creation program that I'm at a loss to describe. So I'll quote from the site:AudioMulch is an interactive musician’s environment for computers running Microsoft Windows. Bringing together the popular with what has up to now been considered experimental, AudioMulch merges the worlds of mainstream electronica and electroacoustic sound composition to create a fluid sonic environment only limited by the artist’s imagination.

AudioMulch is designed around contraptions, signal generators (drum machines, synths, samples), filters and effects (everything you've ever seen as a guitar stompbox, etc), which are hooked together by dragging lines from contraption to contraction like objects in a Visio. Pretty much every imaginable parameter for every contraption can be modified - recorded in the timeline, tweaked via AudioMulch UI in realtime or hooked to a MIDI controller for performance. Realtime parameter changes can be recorded for playback regardless of how they were created.

None of which tells you that by opening a couple example files and copying, pasting and hooking stuff together and grabbing some sample sounds out of music on my laptop I'm ou can bust out electronica like Richard D. James (well except mine is really derivative and crap, but it's my derivitive crap).

AudioMulch is currently in beta and the newest release is free. Registering the product is a whopping $50 which will keep you up-to-date through version 1.0 and subsequent bug releases.

The product also has a substantial mailinglist actively using it and a discography that includes lots of interesting looks into the way the product is being used in professional audio environments.