I only have 512 megs of RAM. I did lower the volume of the audio clip in FCP. Ken, is there a point in the file where you feel it sounds "mushy" or however you were describing it? (eg about 1:45 without creating new in/out points)? Will setting the audio playback to "low" make it sound worse as I am editing? Audio is extremely important to me and I must hear how it sounds during the editing process... not a scrunchy downsampled version of it (or whatever low playback does). I am the kind of guy who would put every setting to "Mega Exteme High" even if I knew that there was zero difference between that and "High"... just because it's there. :) I'll try it and see what happens the next time I boot into X.

Oh and my scratch and capture disk is a completely serparate disk from the OS and FCP, if that matters in this scenario.

Ok, here are your choices, buy more Ram (at least another 512MB) or turn the quality down to low. If you want to run things at the extreme (8 tracks of audio, RT effects, multiple tracks video, HIGH quality audio playback) you need to put an additional gig of ram in.

Even Final Cut Pro 4 doesn't recommend THAT much RAM.

I can't buy RAM from Apple, can I? What is the recommended brand of RAM for Macs?

Apple's memory is over priced in my opinion. I buy my memory from either 18004memory or Memory X. To do what you want you'll need at least 1gig total memory (if you have 512mb, just add another 512mb) but I run mine on 2gigs. Mine is an older (slower) machine.

Jeff's right, Curtis. I strongly suspect that lack of memory is what you're encountering with respect to your audio hiccups if your timeline is complex. 1Gb has become the defacto minimum for video work.

I will definitely get more memory then (thanks for the links, Jeff). Would there be any advantage to having more than 1 Gig's worth of RAM in the immediate future? The 1 Gig of "Hyperspeed" memory is only $198 and that'd put me up to 1.5. The 512 is $109 so it sounds like getting more would be the better deal all around right now.

Things may change under OS 10.3 With that said, I would get as much as you can afford. You can't have too much ram. Under the present OS no single program can access more than 1gig. So, FCP takes the full gig, you still need ram for all the other programs the OS runs. If you want to see where your ram goes, open up the program Process Viewer in your Utilities folder in your Application folder. The window will show you how much ram each program is using and % of CPU time.