audacity - Graphical cross-platform audio editor

audacity [ AUDIO-FILE ] ...

Audacity is a graphical audio editor. This man page does not describe all of the features of Audacity or how to use it; for this, see the html documentation that came with the program, which should be accessible from the Help menu. This man page describes the Unix-specific features, including special files and environment variables.

The only command-line arguments Audacity takes are the names of audio files to open. Audacity currently uses libsndfile to open many uncompressed audio formats such as WAV, AIFF, and AU, and it can also be linked to libmad, libvorbis, and libflac, to provide support for opening MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC files, respectively.

If you specify multiple files on the command-line, Audacity will import all of them into the same project, which is convenient if you want to mix them.

Audacity is an interactive, graphical editor, not a batch-processing tool. There are no options that make it easy to perform an operation on a set of files. If you need to batch-process audio or do simple edits from the command line, use sox.

~/.audacity Per user configuration file.

/tmp/audacity1.2-<user>/ Default location of Audacity's temp directory, where <user> is your username. If this location is not suitable (not enough space in /tmp, for example), you should change the temp directory in the Preferences and restart Audacity. Audacity is a disk-based editor, so the temp directory is very important: it should always be on a fast disk with lots of free space.

Note that older versions of Audacity put the temp directory inside of the user's home directory. This is undesirable on many systems, and using some directory in /tmp is recommended. Open the Preferences to check.

When looking for plug-ins, help files, localization files, or other configuration files, Audacity searches the following locations, in this order:

AUDACITY_PATH Any directories in the AUDACITY_PATH environment variable will be searched before anywhere else.

. The current working directory when Audacity is started.

~/.audacity-files

<prefix>/share/audacity The system-wide Audacity directory, where <prefix> is usually /usr or /usr/local, depending on where the program was installed.

<prefix>/share/doc/audacity The system-wide Audacity documentation directory, where <prefix> is usually /usr or /usr/local, depending on where the program was installed.

For localization files in particular (i.e. translations of Audacity into other languages), Audacity also searches <prefix>/share/locale

Audacity supports two types of plug-ins on Unix: LADSPA and Nyquist plug-ins. These are generally placed in a directory called plug-ins somewhere on the search path (see above).

LADSPA plug-ins can either be in the plug-ins directory, or alternatively in a ladspa directory on the search path if you choose to create one. Audacity will also search the directories in the LADSPA_PATH environment variable for additional LADSPA plug-ins.

Nyquist plug-ins can either be in the plug-ins directory, or alternatively in a nyquist directory on the search path if you choose to create one.

Audacity is distributed under the GPL, however some of the libraries it links to are distributed under other free licenses, including the LGPL and BSD licenses.

See our website for details:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

The most serious bug currently is that it does not gracefully handle running out of disk space.

Primary contributors include Dominic Mazzoni, Joshua Haberman, Matt Brubeck, Shane Mueller, Brian Gunlogson, Vaughan Johnson, Greg Mekkes, James Crook, and Markus Meyer, but dozens of others have contributed, and Audacity would not be possible without wxWidgets, libsndfile, and many of the other libraries it is built upon. For the most recent list of contributors and current email addresses, see our website:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/