I think maybe you should start working with some software that's more fitting for what you're doing. Audacity is great for cutting and arranging audio files, but not so when you need to process a whole track and have to wait for it to finish
Check out REAPER. It has a fairly intuitive interface, VST support, comes with many useful tools for both editing and analyzing audio, processing can be done real-time, best of all, it's free.