Ah yes, music production. This is a dark path that I've just recently started venturing down. In fact, I was playing with the tutorial in Hydrogen (a wizz-bang drum machine) just last night.
Well, to reiterate what I was saying before, I'd be surprised if many of the programs you're looking for can't be found in the repositories. I know Ardour is for sure.
With music production software, my experience has been that there's a lot of variation in terms of user interface between windows and linux applications. So much so, that it's hard to pick out obvious work-alikes sometimes. Having said that, I haven't found anything that I could do on windows that I can't accomplish on linux. Mind you, I am still pretty novice at all this.
If you're looking at building a proper DAW, have you seen dyne:bolic?
http://dynebolic.org/It wasn't for me, because I need my workstation for more than just being a DAW, but if you don't it might be worth taking a look.
