The other day, Charles suggested I take a look at Amadeus Pro for editing my audio.

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I headed on over to the Amadeus website and grabbed the free trial edition, to give it a try.

Yesterday's task was to take a bunch of small audio files, convert them to 22050,8bit,mono, trim them down to no more than half a second, and save them back out.

There might be keyboard shortcuts, I haven't hunted, but as far as I can see, you need to..
1. Open wave
2. Click the bottom left of the window to open the "bitrate" window.
3. Click the options (it resets back to the current bitrate each time, rather than saving your preferred bitrate)
4. Click ok
5. Click the Tracks menu
6. Click Convert to Mono
7. Save

For each and every sound.
For comparison, CoolEdit Pro lets me hit the F11 key to open the conversion window, which saves my last settings.
The methodology on CoolEdit would be.

1. Open file
2. Hit F11
3. Hit Return
4. Save

It's more precise, there's less mouse scrolling involved, it's pretty much a couple of keypresses and I'm on to the next one.

I definitely need to hunt through Amadeus's instructions to see if there are similar keypress shortcuts for those sorts of things, and Batch Processing might help, too.
Thankfully, Amadeus does at least have a Save button that actually works properly, unlike Audacity, which uses Save to mean "Create a new Audacity project" and not "Just save the bloomin' thing"

I'll likely get the hang of it, eventually. After all, I'm comparing something new to me, with something I've been using for a good 20 years or so. These things aren't easy to let go of

So. Yeah.
Thanks to Charles for the suggestion, and I'll see how I get on with it in the future.