Tim:

Hi Johnny - To begin with, and if they are good enough, I want to turn the recordings into a CD.
We will see what happens after that!

Easy then.

Record your music - probably at 16bit/44.1kHz.

Use a card reader or USB lead plugged into your Mac to transfer the recordings to your internal or an external hard drive (7200rpm as advised by M.Ted).

Use Audacity or similar to edit the recordings - so that each track sounds like the finished article.

Export them as interleaved stereo aif files and import those files to an audio CD authoring/burning package to arrange the tracks and burn the CDs.

Toast is the CD software of choice these days but it costs a few dollars and there are freeware and shareware programs available.

I think it is possible to drag files other than aif 44.1kHz into Toast and it will do the conversions for you, but I"ve never tried it as I've been exporting to the proper format for years now and old habits die hard.

I hope that helps.

J