Well, like any other program, it depends on what you want to do with it.
I pretty much use Goldwave just for volume maximizing, cutting out leadings and trailing silences, etc. I do midi in Cakewalk and all audio mixing/reverb/eq, etc, as well.
I make beats in Fruity Loops, and I love it's reverb... wish I could get that in other programs. (Just tried Algorhythm, it opened as if for 1024x768 and when I tried to drag it over so I could even maximize it, it almost crashed my system. So... I definitely won't be using it. Fruity Loops is still the ruler of the beatz.
)
If you want a free program that you can use to make beats or melodies, I'd pick a mod tracker such as MPTrack, though. It will export to a wav file which you can then convert to ogg. Also, their tutorial in the help file is actually helpful.
For audio convertors, I go with dbpoweramp because it has the best sound of any program I've tried in any codec I've tried to use it with, whether wav, mp3, ogg, monkeys audio, anything. Yamp is pretty good for mp3, though.
It just depends what you want to do with your music program, really.
EDIT: Oh, and
here's the harp thing. I converted it to ogg because it was smaller than the original format.
, in case that's why I have no comments. 
