i've found steinberg wavelab to be easiest for recording

i used both already to record my sets, i must say total recorder is the easier from both, but soundforge has the much better features like normalizing, editing or fade out so it's better for recording and stuff

sound forge.

I'd rather use wavelab for straight up recording. I like the graphs for levels when your recording.

All in all, my prefered sound application is adobe audition 1.5.

as far as level normalization, and similar stuff, waves audio makes a number of plugins far superior to the soundforge plugins