While the crowd is busy going wild over Apple’s decision to use Intel processors for the next round of Mac hardware slated for who knows when, here’s something more immediately useful for any Mac owner. Recording audio or editing home movies requires a great deal of processor power and as much memory as your Mac can spare. Before you embark on creating a podcast, making the next Oscar-nominated feature film or adding a voice track to some footage from your daughter’s graduation video, several steps will help make the experience better from a technical perspective. By performing the 10 steps presented in this quick guide to optimizing your Mac for audio recording, you’ll be on the road to faster rendering times and quicker transitions between audio files in no time. And six months from now when Apple switches chips, all the tweaks will still be valid.