program is not responding

Hello everyone. I'm in the middle of transfering audio taples into digitla fromat by impementing soundtrack pro. What I noticed that every manipulation that I try to make to my open source file, the spinning gear starts appear and program stops responding. I do realize that the file its preety massive since the tape lenght at least 60 minutes or so. My question to this forum is if I should compress file first to make it smaller so the mac doesn't hault. Thanks.