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