Thanks. Unfortunately I have an investment in Windows (and all the associated
software) and won't in the near term be going to Linux.
I did some more searching and found a reasonably priced package:
http://www.goldwave.com/features.php
It can create tones and waveshapes, and some are built in:
"The Expression Evaluator allows sound to be generated from almost any equation.
For example, to generate a simple sine wave, the following can be entered:
sin(2*pi*f*t)
General expressions for sine, triangle, and square waves are already provided,
plus expressions for dial tones, effects, and noises."
It looks to do most of the other things I care about too. The price is
apparently around $45 US. That doesn't seem bad--even a starving EE student
could almost afford that. I think I'm on my way to having a garage audio lab.
LOL
There was something similar and in the same ballpark pricewise
named Cool Edit 2000, it was a regular stereo wave editor with pretty
much the features of Goldwave (and a better UI, IMHO), and there was
Cool Edit Pro which was a multitrack recorder/editor for several
hundred dollars. Adobe bought the Cool Edit products, dropped the
lower-end 2000 product (too bad), and renamed the Pro product Adobe
Audiotion and kept the several-hundred-dollar pricetag.
If you can find earlier 'trial'/shareware versions of Goldwave or
Cool Edit 96, maybe on a shareware download site, these are 99 percent
fully functional and very useful as they are.
If what you want is to do audio analysis, there's a free program
named Rightmark that does lots frequency response and distortion
tests, and can give precise measurements even with cheap soundcards
(all consumer/game soundcards are less-than-great quality), since it
tests the card and subtracts its contribution to the test results.
If you're using this for audio-band signals all this will work
okay, but outside of the 20Hz to 20kHz band you'll need a 'real' A/D
card that goes from DC to your upper frequency of interest, and these
aren't so cheap. You might as well get a 'real' oscilloscope. I've got
a Velleman digitizing two-channel scope, it goes to 60MHz, is powered
by a wallwart, plugs into a parallel port, and cost about $300 a few
years back. The Pentium computer and monitor it's plugged into cost a
lot less than that at the thrift store.