Me and a friend have a BBQ planned for next week, and I’m in charge of the mix tape.
In short, what I’m looking for is
- multi-track environment
- envelopes (for fading)
- export-to-wav
VST-support would be a bonus, but not necessary.
Either the Reaper demo or the old freeware version (i think below v1.0). If you have the CD of an old Audigy card, you might find the MixMeister software on it. Not sure if Audacity has envelopes, but might be worth a look too.
Reaper looks really nice, thanks for the tip 
Guess Kristal 1.0 (freeware) is what you’re looking for. It’s been some time since I toyed around with it, but I guess it fits to all of your points.
ardour is what you’re looking for…
Update:
I decided to try both KRISTAL and REAPER.
At first, KRISTAL appealed to me with its simple interface and due to it being freeware. However, I shortly ran into problems with the song length; it wouldn’t go over 8 min 33 seconds…
Since I was mixing some 4 hours of music I tried REAPER instead. A little slower to work with at first, but in the end things really sped up! I love this program, it’s an excellent piece and I’m actually looking forward to trying external RNS mixing.
I can really recommend REAPER if you’re on Windows and tend to shy away from expensive / crippled shareware. REAPER, although being shareware, is uncrippled and very easy to get the hang of.
there use to be some strange program for making anything you had on your harddrive into trance. XD
i am very tempted to find that thing and put my music into it.