Look into a program called Harrison Mixbus. It's a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) made by Harrison Audio Consoles, which is a company that has made and continues to make professional recording/mixing consoles. Those consoles are the real deal and have had some huge stuff recorded and mixed through them (Elton John, Queen, Led Zeppelin, Michael Jackson, Pearl Harbor, Transformers, etc).

Recently, someone at Harrison Mixbus decided they wanted to make a DAW. The goal is to have a DAW with the character of an analog console, so each track adds a little of bit saturation and such to the sound, emulating what happens when sound signal go through the circuits of an analog board (specifically, Harrison analog boards). The DAW also aesthetically resembles an analog board, which is kind of cool, and every channel in the mix window has a good EQ and compressor built in (or you can ignore them if you don't want to fool with them). They're really targeting the niche of those in the audio crowd that need the efficiency and convenience of the digital world, but miss the analog character and experience of large format consoles. It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. If you have to work in Linux, then I would say this is the best DAW for it. It's built on top of Ardour, but they've done a lot to it. Unfortunately, there is no demo for the software. That's really, really stupid, in my opinion. There's only a small team working on the software, so perhaps you can email someone and ask them for a demo. Maybe they'll cave if you say not having a demo is a deal breaker for you. They have a subscription option, too, which is $50 + $9 a month, but that seems silly to me when the one-time price is only $150 right now.

I was given a free copy of Harrison Mixbus from the company (they visited my college and gave some copies away) and I'm glad to have it, but I work faster in Pro Tools and I can approximate that analog sound through plugins in ProTools and Reaper when I want to. I don't run Linux and am already accustomed to ProTools and Reaper, so there's not a lot of reason for me to switch. I do keep it around, though, in case some band says they want that old school analog sound, but don't have the budget to rent a mixing studio with a large console. I would do the mix on Harrison Mixbus for that.

Do your research before plopping down the money. There are several good videos on Youtube discussing it. If I had to start doing audio work on a Linux only machine for some reason, Mixbus is what I would be using.

Here's the link:
http://www.harrisonconsoles.com/mixbus/website/

I was going to say something similar to this. "Limiting" music is a much harsher treatment of music than encoding it as an mp3. For those unfamiliar with the audio jargon, limiting refers to squashing the dynamics of the sound. The loudest peaks of the song are brought down, and then the whole song is brought up in volume. The net result is that the quiet parts become louder. The current trend in music, especially pop music, is to severely limit the tracks. The loudness of a sound comes from the average volume of the sound, not the peak volume. So, limiting the track makes the song consistently as loud as possible, and thus the perceived loudness of the song is unnaturally loud. Loud things get people's attention, and thus you have the "loudness wars."

Besides the distortion that tends to happen in the limiting process, you lose the dynamics of the song. In some songs I think that's fine and can be exciting, but severe limiting is used far too often. Take Dave Grohl's opinions on sound fidelity with a pinch of salt. Perhaps it's not his decision, but the music he puts out has severe limiting. He just made a documentary about a famous music studio, "Sound City." The audio in the film is nice and dynamic, but the soundtrack for the film (which includes original music that was performed in the film) has been limited hard. There's a video that discusses this case that might be interesting to some: http://youtu.be/O3aCNalLojQ

When audio engineers are mixing and mastering songs for "hi-fi" formats like vinyl and SACD, they are much more delicate with their limiting, if they limit it. I think the hi-fi formats themselves don't offer much value to the listener*, but for songs are treated much better for those hi-fi releases. In the video I posted above, the guy compares the vinyl release of a Foo Fighters album to the CD version. He shows the waveform, so you can visually see the affects of limiting on audio (about 2:45 into the video).

As for lossy vs. lossless: We've gotten really good with our lossy formats. Sure, it's getting rid of information, but it is carefully chosen information that humans ears don't easily pick up. I rip all of my CDs as 320kbps mp3, and I don't hear any difference. Even at 128kbps, only people really focusing in on sound quality will notice a difference. People listening to stuff in their car, listening to cheap ear buds, or just playing it as background music don't care.

(*I think hi-fi formats can be great for archiving history. The human ear doesn't pick up on extra information of higher sample rate or analog playback, but there is still extra information there. For people dramatically manipulating the sound, it's often good to have the extra information. Maybe historians will have reason to comb through some of our recordings in the future and analyze the minutiae. I'm sure they'll appreciate the extra information.)

For what it's worth, I'm study audio engineering in college and will be graduating soon. I've definitely got a lot to learn, but I think my studies of audio give a little weight to my opinions. Limiting and lossy audio is always being discussed in my circles. Hope I offered something useful.