Hardware for a music editing rig

So a customer of mine wants me to build a music editing rig for him. I want it to be intel, and be cheaper than 500 bucks. I'm going to put 4gb of ram and a 500gb hdd in a cooler master elite 120, with a gigabyte motherboard. Now here's my question: should I go with a pentium CPU and get a low cost ASUS Xonar sound card, or should I forget the sound card and go with a core i3? Does a sound card help with music editing, or a would a faster CPU be better? Any help is appreciated

The sound card wont help the audio editing in a litteral way, but will provided much better sound accuracy so the guy who work the sound can listen to it "correctly".

Audio editing is'nt usually that hard on the CPU/Ram. An i3 + 4-8gb of ram could be more than enough. With 500$ budget this is the max you can get anyway !

8GB RAM are a real plus, as the more tracks you work with, the more memory you need.
Any "low end" i5 will do the job (a lot of music editing software are multithreaded).
As Boulard83 says, sound card won't help.

^^ I prefer a good clock I3 ( 2core + 2 thread ) to a lower clocked I5 ( 4 core ).

I5 3330 is 3ghz for ~189$
I3 3220 is 3.3ghz for ~129$

He only have 500$ for the entire rig, saving 60 bucks on the CPU could help ALOT. The 2+2 I3 can work nearly as good as the I5 in this scenario.

Thanks, that helps alot! The 3220 is the i3 I was thinking of. I think I'll stick with 4 gb of ram, because a dual channel 4gb kit costs so much now. My customer is just making music at home, so 4gb should be enough anyway.