Experienced users should head down to this section in this document.
Introducing ...
Audacity, a free cross platform audio editor.
For new users to Audacity, see the Tutorial in four parts for some basics on digital audio, setting up Audacity, as well as information on playback and your first recording.
Audacity is currently in version 1.0.0.
This is a stable release of Audacity; it has been tested and works well for most people.
However, it comes with no guarantee, and we depend on your feedback in order to continue
to improve on it. Please check our website for the latest version, including a
beta-quality preview of the next version under development.
Audacity is a collaborative project,
so there are lots of opportunities for you to get involved if you're interested!
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What can you do with Audacity? Audacity is a program that manipulates digital audio waveforms. In addition to recording sounds directly from within the program, it imports many sound file formats, including WAV, AIFF, AU, IRCAM, MP3, and Ogg Vorbis. It supports all common editing operations such as Cut, Copy, and Paste, plus it will mix tracks and apply plug-in effects to any part of a sound. It also has a built-in amplitude envelope editor, a customizable spectrogram mode and a frequency analysis window for audio analysis applications. |
What can't Audacity do? Although Audacity is a very powerful audio editor that works with an unlimited number tracks of virtually unlimited size, it cannot do everything. It cannot :
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How does it work - a quick intro for experienced users
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Audacity works with tracks, that contain one audio file. This file is editable and all actions are undoable. Undo's are instantaneous. Almost anything is undoable, including importing and deleting tracks! There are no inserts, auxes or buses yet. The Windows and Mac versions can use VST plugins, but there is no preview function available yet. |
There is one master gain control in the toolbar. There is volume automation via the envelope tool. Solo does not switch off Mute Editing functions include Cut, Copy, Paste,Duplicate(to new track at same timecode), Split(to new track at same timecode), Silence and Insert Silence. |
What makes Audacity unique?
- Audacity
is
free and the source code is available under the GNU General Public License. - Audacity
is
cross-platform - it runs on Windows (98 through XP), Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, and many Unix platforms, including Linux. - No limits on the number of tracks or the length of any track, except the size of your hard disk.
- Import almost anything: WAV, AIFF, Next/AU, IRCAM, MP3, and MIDI files are supported natively, but Audacity will also open just about any uncompressed sound file and automatically deduce the format (using the Import Raw Data... feature).
- Audacity not only includes many high-quality effects built-in, but also lets you use plug-in effects in the industry-standard VST format. There are dozens of free, shareware, and commercial VST plug-ins online that do everything from Reverb to Noise Reduction.
- Audacity
acts like a
non-destructive editor , providing multiple levels of undo, but it also writes changes made to the audio to disk, eliminating the need for complicated real-time processing. - Label tracks allow you to annotate waveforms (for example, transcribing speech) and later export the waveforms to a text file.
- Powerful spectral features allow you to view waveforms as spectrograms or plot the power spectrum of any region of audio, and even export this data to a spreadsheet.