As a sound editor, Snd is not so hard to use. The initial impediment for me was just learning the key bindings for common operations. (Opening files, jumping to the nearest "zero-crossing", trimming regions, saving files, etc., etc.) Once learned, however, you can really breeze around files without your hands much leaving the keyboard. The author isn't kidding that virtually every function can be customized or extended, so you can even remap all the key bindings if you think they suck or add new ones for functions that don't have a keyboard shortcut.
As just a sound editor, Snd would be pretty great (imho). And it would be just fine to stop there. But a typical install includes the Scheme listener and CLM. The syntax of Scheme is quite simple and remarkably consistent compared to even Python. (Don't let all the parenthesis intimidate!) If you only learn to set variables and call functions in Scheme from the listener, you can do an awful lot in Snd without having to know much else. (That's all I learned, initially.) It's not really advertised as such, but you really have a very capable (non-realtime) audio processor/synthesizer under the hood! A lot of functions have equivalent functionality in CDP. In absence of a proper GUI for CDP on Linux, you may find using Snd preferable in the interim for some operations (e.g., imposing envelopes on sounds). It's a rather unusual tool. It probably tries to do too much by including CLM, but--like CDP--allows for a lot of precision. I think a lot of the reason it seems overwhelming is really all this "extra" functionality built in--the author really gets carried away in the documentation describing all of it!
