You might also want to have a look at Audacity. Its open source and its
free. Its available on Win, Mac & Linux.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net

It has similar features to Goldwave including plugin. It has a good
interface and very easy to use. Although I have only had it for few days
and have not done any long recordings, the performance looks promising. On
my Athlon 900 its start very quickly (1 - 2 secs) and you can start
recording imediately.

-Q