music program
 

i'm looking for a music program (preferably downloadable). something that records, has sound effects, has samples etc. any suggestions?

Fruityloops!

Or if you just want massive amount of sound effects I would go with Reason.

If you're looking for making beats go with Fruity like RezZ said but if your going to record vocals you want to go with something more like Acid Pro or. . . Pro Tools. :)

If you want more control than you have with fruityloops, let's say you wanna build your beats and everything else from the ground up and you wanna have full control of your music, like making songs in alternating, non-traditional time signatures and so on ..

.. Then you should look into trackers - like Renoise (modern and more advanced Fasttracker 2 clone).

I like Ableton a lot, not very difficult to work with and you can sort it out yourself quite easily.

On the PC I like Ableton too. Cubase might be easier to learn. There are cheap versions of both. If you only dabble in music and need loops, then I'd say FL Studio/fruity loops. Macs come with Garage Band which is the easiest audio program ever.