The author is correct in stating that Audacity is somewhat daunting, but the time spent learning this application is worth it. There are many free resources and tutorials to ease your learning. There are thousands of plug-ins to customize the program if you wish.
Some of the free tutorials I like are:
Audacity.sourceforge.net
www.guidesandtutorials.com
wiki.audacityteam.org
Brown University’s excellent resource: wiki.Brown.edu/
The Brown site has a great method to create a karaoke from a vocal recording.
Also, many artists share techniques on You-Tube. Just search audacity tutorials and you will find lots of content. I find these to be more advanced and require a working knowledge of the program.
It should also be noted that Audacity is an open source program the same way Firefox is. It is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Ubuntu, etc. It is also available in MANY different languages.