Editing Audio - Soundtrack and / or Final Cut?

I am a former audio engineer doing some editing in FCP 6. I have always been frustrated with trying to do even basic clean up of audio from events.

I have an hour long clip of a woman at a podium. I simply want to do a slight dip in EQ somewhere around 300 HZ and apply a low cut filter. Then I want gentle compression/limiting just to take the peaks off a few places where applause is too loud.


I first try this in FCP. The problem is when I add the filters I have to render the audio before I can hear it- nothing even close to real time.And the parameter controls are not particularly standard. The FCP manual says little specifics about controls. For example "Q",. Its numbered 1-20. Is that 1 through 20 octaves or what do those numbers mean? Bummer.

So I send the whole thing to soundtrack. It takes about 8-9 minutes to open this hour long file. Then I apply things I want but it crashes - twice. jeesh.

has anyone found a reasonably clean straightforward way to do basic stuff like this without jumping through hoops?