If you’re looking for an easy way to import and convert audio on the Mac, give Audacity a try.

I needed to archive an audio transcript from a recent meeting that I had recorded on an old-fashioned digital voice recorder. I say old-fashioned because it doesn’t have bluetooth or Firewire or even USB to download the audio files directly onto my computer. The only way is to plug it into the computer’s microphone jack and record the audio input directly. I had just gotten iLife, so I figured this would be a great time to try out the new version of GarageBand, which has some neat features for producing podcasts. What the heck – a meeting is pretty much just like a podcast, right? So I fired up Garage Band, and started recording. All went well, until I realized that Garage Band requires 120% or more of my PowerBook’s processor, about ten times as much memory as I have, and a couple terabytes of hard drive space (I exaggerate, but not by much). Because of the high processor overhead, I couldn’t use my computer while it was recording. I found that if I so much as opened a Finder window, GarageBand would stop recording. Great, so I guess that means my computer is tied up for an hour and a half while it records. Ok, well it’s gotta be done. Turns out my computer was tied up for a lot longer than that. After three or four failed attempts to import the full audio, then waiting for it to export into MP3 format, I had wasted about four to five hours. All that, and my final MP3 file was truncated because I didn’t understand how to set up the timing in GarageBand correctly. Ugh.

So I found Audacity. It was just what I needed. Simple, fast, easy, and it let me keep working on my computer while it was recording. And it’s free, too. Imagine that! The one caveat is that, while it does support MP3 exporting, you have to download the LAME MP3 encoder separately. No big deal, I just downloaded the LAMELib file and saved it in the same folder where I had put the Audacity application. So I’m happy – the job is done, the audio is exported, and I got to get work done in the process.

By the way, I’ve deleted GarageBand from my hard drive – it was taking up something like 10 Gigs of space! Audacity stays though.