The recording and playback levels can be set using the sliders in the Recording and Playback meter toolbars:

• The slider with the microphone icon sets the recording volume on a system level. If the operating system is prohibiting this action, this slider will be inactive.

• The slider with the speaker icon sets the playback volume relative to the system volume. It does not affect the volume of exported files, use the gain sliders on each track to edit those.

Due to patent restrictions, FFmpeg cannot be distributed with Audacity itself. However, FFmpeg is required to import and export a variety of audio formats, including M4A and WMA.

You can download and install FFmpeg as follows:

If you have two clips in one track you'd like to crossfade, you can use Crossfade Clips effect. To use it:

1. Have two clips in one track.

2. Select the region you'd like to apply the crossfade to. Try to select roughly the same amount of time in both clips.

From

(this probably is a category on its own, but let's write it on this page for now)

• Making new tracks

• Use case: spoken word with music in the background

With Audacity 3.2 you can quickly share audio online using the new service audio.com. To do this, simply click the Share Audio button.

You can now upload your audio by pressing Continue. If you'd like to link an existing audio.com first, you can do that by clicking Link Account.

Audacity will now prepare the track for upload and upload your audio.

After your audio has been uploaded, press Continue. You will be taken to the audio.com website.

On audio.com you now can either create an account to use this with, or copy the anonymous link. To share the link,

1. Close the sign up panel,

2. click the share button (shown below) and

3. select Copy Link

You now can share your audio by sending this link to people.

Linking your audio.com account to Audacity lets you get the sharable link from Audacity itself. To link your account,

1. Press the Share Audio button. Note: You need to have some sort of audio present in your project for this button to work

2. Your browser will open audio.com

3. Login or sign up if you aren't yet logged in

Downloading & installing realtime effects

While Audacity doesn't yet ship with realtime effects, you can download plugins for it. Currently supported plugin formats are Audio Units (macOS only), VST3, VST, LV2, and LADSPA. We have collected some plugins which we know to work on but you can find many more across the web. Once you install the plugins, they should be detected by Audacity once you restart it, if not, see the installation instructions.

Adding effects to a track

You can add realtime effects using the following steps:

Changing effect settings

You can change the effect settings by clicking on the effect's name. This will open a settings window, often with a graphical interface which looks nothing like Audacity itself. You still can interact with the main Audacity window while the effect settings are open.

You can press the blue power button next to an effect (or the entire effects stack) to bypass it, causing it to be not applied to your audio.

It generally is not necessary to apply the effect stack. The stack is automatically applied when .

That said, you can apply the effect stack to the waveform by first selecting the track and then going to Tracks > Mix > Mix and Render.

The setup program may return one of the following exit codes:

Before returning an exit code of 1, 3 or 4 an error message explaining the problem will normally be displayed.

Future versions may return additional exit codes, so applications checking the exit code should be programmed to handle unexpected exit codes gracefully. Any non-zero exit code indicates that Setup was not run to completion.

Can't open an MP3 file

If you see an error when importing an MP3 file, it can have the following causes:

• Your file isn't using the MP3 codec, but instead is using a codec associated with another file extension (for example, the Advanced Audio Codec (aac) usually is found in .m4a files, and PCM Wave is usually found in .wav files). A true MP3 file will show MPEG Audio, Version 1, Layer 3. To solve this error, you can use MediaInfo to find out what the actual codec used in the file, and change the file extension accordingly (for example rename the audio.mp3 file to audio.m4a).

• Your file is partially broken (Huffman Data Overrun). This is a bug with Audacity versions 3.1.3 and earlier, and you can fix it by of Audacity.

• Your file is fully broken. If it can't be opened in Audacity, or anywhere else, your file might just be broken. This itself may have several reasons:

  • If you just recently downloaded it from the internet, you may want to try downloading it again - in case there was a transmission error.

  • If you just created it yourself, it might be that there was a write error. If possible try saving the file again, re-installing the app that was used to create it, or using a different app to create it.

There can be several reasons for this. Some things to try:

• If using a wired headphone, make sure that the wire is plugged in and that the plug is clean.

• Make sure that the headphones are selected in the Audio Settings output. Note: On some devices, the internal card - usually called something among the lines of "HD Audio" are handling both internal speakers and headphones, depending on which is plugged in. You may need to select this option anyway even if it says "Speaker" instead of "Headphones"

• If you connected the headphones after starting Audacity, you may need to go to Transport -> Rescan Audio Devices to make them show up in the Audio Setup list.

This page is an overview of prominent new functionality that has been introduced in Audacity 3.0.4

Version 3.0.4 is a hotfix release.

Fixed a bug with envelope points, which could multiply uncontrollably and cause Audacity to crash. In particular:

• : Envelope points are multiplied when using Filter Curve EQ or Graphic EQ

You can download various plugins here:

Most plugins get automatically activated once you install them on your system.

Manually installing plugins

If a plugin doesn't get found by Audacity, or doesn't come with an installer, move the plugin files to one of the following locations:

To install a Nyquist Plugin, follow these steps:

1. Download the plugin(s) in question.

2. Open Audacity, and go to Tools > Nyquist Plugin Installer

3. Click Browse and locate your downloaded plugin(s)

1. Go to Tools > Plugin Manager

2. Select the plugins or effects you want to deactivate

3. Click Disable.

Using the Track Controls

You can adjust volume and panning per track on the left-hand side of any track:

Using the Mixer Board

You can access the Mixer Board via View > Mixer Board.

This shows all track controls side-by-side, with a volume slider on the left per track, as well as per-track volume meters.

By default, the icon for each track is the Audacity logo, but it can be changed if the track name contains the following keywords:

Once you have your changes to mixing, panning and other real-time effects final and want to apply them onto the waveform itself, you can render the mix using Tracks > Mix > Mix and Render. This replaces all selected tracks with the mix. If you have used many tracks and real time effects, this may considerably improve performance.

Writing Tutorials and User Guides

Audacity welcomes contributions to both Audacity 3.x and , whether it's a small spelling correction or an entirely new guide. If you're not sure what to start with, check out some good first issues:

Gitbook works a bit like a wiki in that you can edit all pages freely, but unlike a wiki, it uses git's "everyone has their own branch" principle. That is to say that the changes you make are independent of everyone else's changes, and won't show up on the main (live) website until the branches are merged.

To some degree, this means that you can do whatever you want in your branch. That said, there's some things which make things easier for everyone involved:

When editing on Gitbook, you can edit existing pages, but you cannot create new ones. If you'd like to make a page about a new topic, write to LWinterberg in the discord server. You also can hand in Markdown files or Word documents to him directly to add. This restriction does not apply when Editing through GitHub, however, there are other technical oddities when editing through GitHub.

Making Video Tutorials

Video tutorials are highly appreciated as part of a guide. You can upload them to YouTube (or Vimeo/Dailymotion/...) and embed them in your guides, or in other people's guides, like this:

We have some requirements for which video tutorials are accepted into Audacity Support pages (see the for more info)

Audacity 3.1.2 was released on 16. Nov 2021.

Changes and improvements since previous version

Audacity 3.1.2 is a hotfix release for Audacity 3.1.

It fixes the following bugs:

• Fixed UTF8 support in clip titles #2135

• Fixed data loss on joining clips

• Fixed a crash with exporting resampled tracks

• Fixed a crash when opening projects with very small double values

Windows

• Audacity 3.1.x requires the CPU to support the instruction set which should be available on any Intel hardware produced after 2001 and any AMD hardware produced after 2003.

  • To check what SSE levels your CPU supports, you can install .

  • If your hardware only supports SSE, you may download Audacity 2.0.6 see the page on the Audacity Website.

macOS / Mac OS X

• Audacity 3.1.x is for Intel Macs running OS X 10.7 and later and macOS.

  • There are legacy versions for older OS X at .

Linux

• Linux support is tested on Ubuntu Linux.

  • Other Linux distributions should work, but aren't tested by the Audacity team.

Audacity 3.2.1 was released on 05 Oct 2022

This is a patch release for Audacity 3.2. It fixes some bugs.

Changes and improvements since previous version

• #3686 Fixed Audacity crashing on startup on some systems.

• #3694 Fixed a crash when applying Waves Berzerk Distortion Mono to a mono track.

• Fixed a freeze when very quickly starting and stopping playback.

• macOS: Homebrew FFmpeg installs are now found automatically.

• macOS: Fixed Melda VST Plugin UI.

• Building with VST3 support is now possible without Conan.

A full list of changes can be found .

Windows

• Audacity 3.2 supports Windows 10 & 11

  • Windows Vista, 7 and 8.1 should still work, but are no longer tested.

  • Downloads for older versions are available on the page on the Audacity Website.

macOS / Mac OS X

• Audacity 3.2 supports OS X 10.9 and later, and macOS.

  • There are legacy versions for older OS X at .

Linux

• In addition to the traditional update path via package managers, Audacity 3.0.3 and onwards are distributed as an AppImage. The AppImage gets updated at the same time as the Windows and macOS versions, so if you collaborate with users on those platforms, you may want to use the AppImage over your distribution's package manager.

• Linux support is tested on Ubuntu 20.04.

  • Other Linux distributions should work, but aren't tested by the Audacity team.

Audacity 3.1.1 was released on 11. Nov 2021.

Audacity 3.1.1 replaces all previous versions.

This is a hotfix release. It fixes the following bugs:

• Fixed FFMPEG imports only importing the left channel

Audacity is being developed on Github. Most information necessary to contributing code can be found there, such as building instructions.

Pages under this section are just stubs. Feel free to work on them. Check out the Style Guide and Making Tutorials and User Guides for more info

We maintain a list of free VSTs and similar plugins on plugins.audacityteam.org. You can find, test and add plugins to the list.

To do this, you can get access to the plugins space via https://www.audacityteam.org/gitbook-plugins and then edit the relevant sections.

Exact details can be found here: https://plugins.audacityteam.org/contributing/adding-plugins-to-this-site

• https://alphamanual.audacityteam.org/man/Sync-Locked_Track_Groups

Any page of both support.audacityteam.org and plugins.audacityteam.org can be edited either on Gitbook (see Writing Tutorials and User Guides for instructions) or using Markdown syntax on GitHub.

Editing through Github.com

A link for GitHub is shown either on the right-hand side or in an overflow menu of any page:

Once you are on GitHub, you will see a pencil in the top right of the file.

You now can make your changes to the page.

Once you are done, press Propose Changes

This brings you to a page where you can review your changes. If you are satisfied, click Create Pull Request.

After you click "create pull request", it will show up on and await review by an Audacity team member.

You can edit Markdown in any text editor. More advanced editors like may show useful shortcuts and visualizations for easier and faster editing, but in principle, even the simplest text editors like Windows Notepad can be used to create them.

To get started, first clone the repository, either using git clone by clicking the code button on and opening it in GitHub Desktop

Once it's cloned, you'll find the files of support.audacityteam.org in the main branch, and the files of plugins.audacityteam.org in the plugins branch. Any additional branches have been split off from the main branch to preserve documentation for previous versions of Audacity.

Outside from the , there are some more technical things you need to be aware of:

• The sidebar menu is handled through , not the file structure itself. If you want the page you created to show up in the sidebar, you will need to update this file accordingly. That said: Try to match the structure of SUMMARY.md with the folder structure.

• While you technically can work directly in your fork's main/plugins branch, it is highly recommended to make a new branch based on upstream/main or upstream/plugins instead for your changes. This way, you can always fast-forward merge the latest changes into your fork.

This article addresses the following error codes in Audacity:

• Error code 11

• Error code 13

• Error code 101

• "Audacity failed to read a file in C:" (or D:, E:, ...)

Make sure you use the latest version of Audacity. See for more information.

Sometimes, just opening the file in the latest version automatically recovers the project. If not, proceed with the following steps:

First, download the latest version of the Audacity Project Tools:

After downloading, follow the instructions relevant to your system. Note: macOS is not supported yet.

Audacity 3.0.4 was released on 24. Aug 2021.

Changes and improvements since previous version

Audacity 3.0.4 replaces all previous versions.

This is a hotfix release that fixes a bug with envelope points, which could multiply uncontrollably and cause Audacity to crash. In particular:

• #1476: Envelope points are multiplied when using Filter Curve EQ or Graphic EQ

• : Filter Curve EQ will crash if there is an envelope point outside of the selection

This fix re-introduces an earlier, but way less destructive bug:

• / : Some effects delete Envelope Control Points, or do not move them when timeline changes

Other than that, this release is identical to Version 3.0.3.

Windows

• Audacity 3.0.4 requires the CPU to support the instruction set which should be available on any Intel hardware produced after 2001 and any AMD hardware produced after 2003.

  • To check what SSE levels your CPU supports, you can install .

  • If your hardware only supports SSE, you may download Audacity 2.0.6 see the page on the Audacity Website.

macOS / Mac OS X

• Audacity 3.0.4 is for Intel Macs running OS X 10.7 and later and macOS.

  • There are legacy versions for older OS X at .

Linux

• Linux support is tested on Ubuntu Linux.

  • Other Linux distributions should work, but aren't tested by the Audacity team.

Audacity 3.2.5 was released on 1 Mar 2023

This is a hotfix release. It fixes the following bug:

• #4374 Fixed a bug where Audacity could accidentally spam audio.com

Supported platforms

Windows

• Audacity 3.2 supports Windows 10 & 11

  • Windows Vista, 7 and 8.1 should still work, but are no longer tested.

  • Downloads for older versions are available on the page on the Audacity Website.

macOS / Mac OS X

• Audacity 3.2 supports OS X 10.9 and later, and macOS.

  • There are legacy versions for older OS X at .

Linux

• In addition to the traditional update path via package managers, Audacity 3.0.3 and onwards are distributed as an AppImage. The AppImage gets updated at the same time as the Windows and macOS versions, so if you collaborate with users on those platforms, you may want to use the AppImage over your distribution's package manager.

• Linux support is tested on Ubuntu 20.04.

  • Other Linux distributions should work, but aren't tested by the Audacity team.

TODO

If Audacity shows you an error message when trying to record or playback audio start using Transport > Rescan Audio Devices to update the list of devices.

After rescanning audio devices try selecting a different host using the Audio Setup button and make sure the desired device is selected as your Recording or Playback Device

If the error is still present try changing the Project Rate to a different value:

Verify that the Recording Meter Toolbar and the Playback Meter Toolbar sliders are set to an appropiate level. Place the mouse cursor over the meter and Audacity will display the corresponding level

This error indicates a problem with the hardware used for playback, whether it is permissions, drivers, connections, or if you ask the device to do something it cannot do. You can attempt the following steps to resolve it.

This error indicates a problem with the hardware used for recording, whether it is permissions, drivers, connections, or if you ask the device to do something it cannot do. You can attempt the following steps to resolve it.

These errors can occur when attempting to load a damaged .aup3 project file. Damaged project files can be recovered as described in the following article.

This error indicates that the device that's being attempted to use is not valid, for example:

When you select an effect to apply to your audio (for example Effect > Noise Removal & Repair > Noise Gate...) Audacity will show you the effect settings window where you can change the different values according to your needs.

After you find the settings that best suit your needs you can use the Presets & settings button to save your settings for future use:

• Click the Presets & settings button and select Save preset...

If you know Audacity well, but don't want to , you can help users out directly. The most active communities in this regard are:

• The ,

• the , and

You can reset Audacity by going to the following menus:

• To reset the toolbars only: View -> Toolbars -> Reset Toolbars

• To reset everything: Tools -> Reset Configuration

If you cannot open Audacity or want a more thorough cleanup, you can also delete the configuration files manually. They can be found in the following locations:

Audacity can record and playback audio on your Windows PC using one of the following three alternative interfaces:

• MME

• Windows DirectSound

Audacity 3.2.4 was released on 27 Jan 2023

This is a hotfix release. It fixes the following bug:

• # Fixed the meters not retaining size

A full list of changes can be found .

Windows

• Synchronizing with claps

Changing the speed while preserving pitch

To change the speed while preserving the pitch, select the audio you want to apply the effect on and go to Effect > Change Tempo

Drag the slider or enter some numbers to change how much you want to speed up or slow down your audio. The controls are linked, so you just need to change the value you care about, the rest will update accordingly.

For extreme slowdowns (10x slower to thousands of times slower), you may want to use Effect > Paulstretch instead.

Changing speed and pitch at the same time

To change speed and pitch at the same time, use Effect > Change Speed.

Unlike , the Change Speed effect keeps the waveform mostly intact, so you can use this method repeatedly without any major loss in quality.

You can change the speed of an entire project over time using Time Tracks. To add one, go to Tracks > Add New > Time Track. You only can have one time track per project.

Then click on the blue line and drag it upwards or downwards to change the speed at that time. Every time you click, a new control point is added, allowing you to change the speed over time

If you want to preview your audio at a faster or slower rate than normal, but without affecting the final product, you can use the Play-at-Speed toolbar

To use it, drag the slider to the desired speed (between 0.01x and 3x) and then click the small play button next to it to playback your audio at that speed. You can use the normal stop and pause controls to stop/pause playback.

Saving projects

You can save projects using the File > Save Project menu. A saved project (.aup3) has the most information about your project available, but can only be opened in Audacity. There are three options available, each useful for a different use case:

• Save Project (Ctrl+S/Cmd+S) will save your current project. If you save for the first time, you may need to specify where to save it to.

• Save Project As... will save your project in a new place and continue editing on it, should you want the original project to remain untouched.

• Backup Project... will save the current state of the project in a new file, but won't switch to it.

You can export your project into an audio file using the File > Export menu. Exported audio (.mp3, .wav, .ogg, and more) can be opened with a wide variety of programs, and uploaded to some social media, but may have worse quality and lose some Audacity-specific information.

In the File > Export menu, you'll see a few different options:

• Export as MP3, Export as WAV and Export as OGG will export your project into the selected format.

• Export Audio... (Ctrl+Shift+E/Cmd+Shift+E) will provide you options to export to more uncommon formats, such as FLAC, M4A, AC3, WMA, AMR, MP2 and custom FFMPEG exports.

There are also two additional options which export non-audio data:

• Export Labels... will export labels if you have any.

• Export MIDI... will export the currently selected note track as a MIDI or Allegro file. You can only export one note track at a time.

Audacity 3.0.5 was released on 29 Sep 2021.

Changes and improvements since previous version

Audacity 3.0.5 replaces all previous macOS versions.

This is a hotfix release that fixes a bug on macOS that could corrupt project files when being opened via cmd+o on languages where the decimal separator wasn't a dot.

Other than that, this release is identical to Version 3.0.3.

Supported Platforms

Windows

• Audacity 3.0.5 requires the CPU to support the instruction set which should be available on any Intel hardware produced after 2001 and any AMD hardware produced after 2003.

  • To check what SSE levels your CPU supports, you can install .

  • If your hardware only supports SSE, you may download Audacity 2.0.6 see the page on the Audacity Website.

• 3.0.5 does not support Windows XP.

  • You may try 2.2.2 on XP, but it is unsupported.

macOS / Mac OS X

• Audacity 3.0.5 is for Intel Macs running OS X 10.7 and later and macOS.

  • There are legacy versions for older OS X at .

Linux

• In addition to the traditional update path via package managers, Audacity 3.0.3 and onwards are distributed as an AppImage. The AppImage gets updated at the same time as the Windows and macOS versions, so if you collaborate with users on those platforms, you may want to use the AppImage over your distribution's package manager.

• Linux support is tested on Ubuntu Linux.

  • Other Linux distributions should work, but aren't tested by the Audacity team.

Testing Audacity is one of the best ways to find bugs.

Nightly builds

You can download the latest master build from https://audacityteam.org/nightly. These builds reflect the state the master branch. Anything in the master branch has passed at least a quick round of QA to validate that the features the change touched still work for the common use cases.

Before features go into the master branch, they live in pull requests. Each pull request comes with its own builds, available through the "Checks" tab inside the PR and then the "Artifacts" dropdown in the top right. Additionally, you can get builds which are still in development from https://github.com/audacity/audacity/actions. Both methods require a Github account.

When you do find something that breaks, make sure to file a bug (or comment on the pull request that introduces the bug if it's unmerged)!

Alpha, Beta and Release builds

Before each release, a branch is split off master named "release-x.x.x". This release branch contains all features which will be part of the next Audacity release. Bug fixes which go towards this release will be made inside this branch. You can get builds for it via ; the nightly link will continue to give you master branch builds.

During the release process we may designate certain builds as "alpha" or "beta" and release them on . This is to invite testing from a wider audience.

Audacity comes with some tools to aid you with testing.

See - these can make it easier for you to do repeated tasks.

Journaling is a feature that records all your actions and lets you replay them. This feature is currently under development and not really ready.

1. start Audacity in journaling mode, <<TODO: HOW??>> do a certain task, and then close Audacity again. This will generate a journal file, which you can find in <<WHERE>>.

2. Copy the journal file to a new folder (eg: QA-tests) and name it so that you can easily find it again.

3. Launch Audacity from the command line, like this:

Audio loops are a type of music that plays a few bars on repeat over and over. They can be created by taking a sample out of pre-existing content and looping it seamlessly.

1. Enable playback looping

To enable playback looping, simply click onto the loop button (1). When you do this, you'll note the blue looping region appear in the timeline (2). You can move the region and it's in and out point individually by dragging it.

2. Finding the looping region

When making a loop out of music, you often will be able to see repetitions in the waveform as your source material will probably contain some loop already (for example a drummer playing the same beat throughout the song). You can use these to roughly find good looping regions and position your looping region above it.

Fine-tuning the loop and removing clicks

To make the loop seamless, you may need to zoom in some more, using Ctrl+Scroll (Cmd+Scroll) or the magnifying glass.

Once your loop sounds right, you can select it's length in the waveform. A yellow line will appear when your cursor is lined up with the loop region properly. Once you have made the selection, you now can simply right-click > Split Clip (Ctrl+I, Cmd+I).

Once you have the clip, you can copy-paste it anywhere in your project.

Audacity 3.3.2 was released on 5. May 2023.

This is a hotfix release.

Bug Fixes

• #4629 Linux AppImage fails to start.

• #4637 Issues with selection and time toolbars on Linux packages.

• Missing duration input in generators on Linux packages.

• Potentialy extreme memory usage with Jack host.

• Anonymous upload to is disabled.

Windows

• Audacity 3.3 is tested on Windows 10 & 11

  • Windows Vista, 7 and 8.1 should still work, but are no longer tested.

macOS / Mac OS X

• Audacity 3.3 is tested on macOS 12 & 13

  • OS X 10.9 and onwards should still work, but are no longer tested.

Linux

• In addition to the traditional update path via package managers, Audacity is distributed as an AppImage. The AppImage gets updated at the same time as the Windows and macOS versions, so if you collaborate with users on those platforms, you may want to use the AppImage over your distribution's package manager.

• Linux support is tested with AppImages on Ubuntu 20.04 & 22.04.

  • Other Linux distributions should work, but aren't tested by the Audacity team.

Audacity is not yet compatible with Conan 2.

Audacity 3.3.1 was released on 28. Apr 2023.

This is a hotfix release.

Bug Fixes

• #4600 Fixed cut lines massively inflating project size.

• #4612 Fixed custom project sample rates being uneditable.

• Fixed crash reporting being disabled.

• Audacity now shows an error if the upload to audio.com exceeds file size limits.

• Fixed an error in calculating channels when uploading to audio.com.

Windows

• Audacity 3.3 is tested on Windows 10 & 11

  • Windows Vista, 7 and 8.1 should still work, but are no longer tested.

macOS / Mac OS X

• Audacity 3.3 is tested on macOS 12 & 13

  • OS X 10.9 and onwards should still work, but are no longer tested.

Linux

• In addition to the traditional update path via package managers, Audacity is distributed as an AppImage. The AppImage gets updated at the same time as the Windows and macOS versions, so if you collaborate with users on those platforms, you may want to use the AppImage over your distribution's package manager.

• Linux support is tested with AppImages on Ubuntu 20.04 & 22.04.

  • Other Linux distributions should work, but aren't tested by the Audacity team.

Audacity is not yet compatible with Conan 2.

Using the Click Removal effect

The click removal effect can automatically remove clicks across an entire track.

To use it:

1. Select the audio you want to remove the clicks from. Tip:

2. Go to Effect > Click Removal

3. Set the threshold and max spike width. The default should work in most cases. You can preview the effect to get a feel of how it'll affect the track.

4. Click OK to apply the effect.

The Repair effect can be used to repair short clicks. To use it:

1. Select a short (max 128 samples) part of audio. Tip: You can set the selection clocks in the bottom toolbar to display start and length of the selection, and change the clocks to display samples rather than milliseconds.

2. Go to Effect > Repair.

In most cases, having brief amounts of silence is preferable to loud clicks, so completely muting clicks is a valid strategy if other methods fail. For this, simply select the click and press the Silence button (Shortcut: Ctrl+L / Cmd+L).

These help articles have been created by the following people:

• Leo Wattenberg

• Gonzalo Guzmán

• (add your name here if you're editing some pages!)

Contents on this page are licensed under the license. This does not necessarily apply to embedded videos.

has been made possible by a tremendous amount of effort from the following people:

• Gale Andrews

• Richard Ash

• David Bailes

Translators:

• Carmelo Battaglia (Italian)

• Leo Clijsen (Dutch)

• Olivier Humbert (French)

Some of their efforts have been ported over to this site.

Audacity 3.2.3 was released on 27 Dec 2022

This is a patch release for Audacity 3.2. It adds ability to share audio publicly and fixes some bugs.

Changes

• #3884 Audio can now be shared publicly on audio.com

• #4040 fixed the screenshot tool

• selecting audio no longer marks the project as changed

• a new toolbar with cut/copy/paste buttons has been added

• Plain UI for VST3 effects no longer show MIDI CC parameters

• the effects sidebar no longer can fill the entire screen

A full list of changes can be found .

Windows

• Audacity 3.2 supports Windows 10 & 11

  • Windows Vista, 7 and 8.1 should still work, but are no longer tested.

  • Downloads for older versions are available on the page on the Audacity Website.

macOS / Mac OS X

• Audacity 3.2 supports OS X 10.9 and later, and macOS.

  • There are legacy versions for older OS X at .

Linux

• In addition to the traditional update path via package managers, Audacity 3.0.3 and onwards are distributed as an AppImage. The AppImage gets updated at the same time as the Windows and macOS versions, so if you collaborate with users on those platforms, you may want to use the AppImage over your distribution's package manager.

• Linux support is tested on Ubuntu 20.04.

  • Other Linux distributions should work, but aren't tested by the Audacity team.

Audacity comes with 4 themes preinstalled: Light, Dark, Classic and High Contrast. You can switch between themes by going to Edit -> Preferences -> Interface (macOS: Audacity -> Preferences -> Interface)

Once you have chosen a theme, click OK to close the preferences dialog and load the new theme.

Installing custom themes

Custom themes commonly are distributed as files called ImageCache.png. You can find some custom themes here:

To install a custom theme, place the ImageCache.png in the following folders. You may create the folders if they aren't present.

• Windows: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Audacity\Theme\custom\

• MacOS: ~/Library/Application Support/audacity/Theme/custom/

• Linux: ~/.local/share/audacity/Theme/custom/

Then,

1. restart Audacity,

2. open the Preferences -> Interface page,

3. select Custom as the theme and

If your audio recording broke and you immediately noticed it (for example because you misspoke your script or had to cough), it is possible to stop the recording and immediately fix the mistake by using Punch-and-roll recording. To use it:

1. Record as normal until you make the mistake.

2. Stop the recording.

If the vocals are panned in the center of a stereo track this method can sometimes be effective by removing what is common to both tracks (that is, the vocals), leaving behind what is different (that is, the instrumentals).

Audacity includes the Vocal Reduction and Isolation effect which provides the Remove Vocals option that you can use to try to remove vocals from a stereo track.

Vocal Reduction and Isolation also lets you specify the audio frequency range for vocals (by default 120 to 9000 Hz). This can help cure the common problem where center-panned bass or Hi-hat is also removed when removing vocals.

You can also use the effect to attempt to isolate the vocals by choosing one of the Isolate Vocals options from the dropdown menu in the dialog.

You can connect your mic by plugging it into the appropriate port. In general, this means:

• If you have a USB mic, plug it into a USB port.

• If you have a mic with a 3.5mm jack, plug it into a mic-in port.

You can enable a more musical view in Audacity as follows:

1. Right-click the Timeline Ruler and select Beats and Measures.

2. Go to View -> Toolbars and enable Time Signature Toolbar (beta).

Audacity provides you with two different built-in normalization effects available through the Effect -> Volume and Compression menu:

• Loudness Normalization

• Normalize

Normalize

If Audacity crashes or the computer loses power, Audacity should normally recover the projects automatically when you restart. The steps on this page describe how to recover audio from the project's _data folder or Audacity's temporary folder if:

• Automatic Crash Recovery does not work correctly

• You saved a project without apparent crash, but Audacity was shut down before the AUP project file was written or you do not have a usable AUP file.

The steps on this page will only recover unedited recordings (and stereo recordings may be recovered with sections of left and right channel in the wrong channel).

If you saved an AUP project file, the _data folder you need to recover from will be in the directory to which you originally saved the AUP file.

If you never saved an AUP project file, you need to recover from Audacity's temporary folder. You can see the exact location in Directories Preferences, otherwise you can see the location in the "TempDir" line in the audacity.cfg settings file. By default the Audacity temporary folder should be as follows.

• Windows: C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Local\Audacity\SessionData

• Mac: /Users/<your username>/Library/Application Support/audacity/SessionData

• GNU/Linux: /var/tmp/audacity-<your username>

If you are upgrading from previous Audacity, that version's temporary directory may be changed to the relevant safe location above if the previous location was known to be prone to deletion by cleanup applications or system restart.

If you only have a few AU files to recover, use the "Import Audio" command to open all the .au files from the Audacity temporary folder or project _data folder. Use shift-click or control-click to select multiple files. The files will be in approximately 6-second chunks and will be on separate tracks in the Audacity screen. Files from stereo tracks will alternate between left and right channels.

1. Click in the Track Control Panel (by the Mute/Solo buttons) of the topmost track.

2. Shortcut Z or Select > Region > Ends to Zero Crossings.

3. Edit > Remove Special > Trim.

Play the result.

Cut and paste as needed if any files are found to be in the wrong order or the wrong channel.

Tools written for legacy Audacity 1.2 can automate data recovery.

Open Audacity's temporary or project _data folder in your system file manager. Sort the files by timestamp order (earliest first), then rename them using a consecutive alphanumerical sequence, lowest number first. An arrangement looking something like this should work:

b001.au 15:56:02 b002.au 15:56:02 b003.au 15:56:10 b004.au 15:56:10

• On Windows, Explorer cannot rename to a sequence acceptable to the recovery tools. You can use instead the Mass Rename tool in the 21-day trial Professional or Ultimate versions of . These versions will let you recover an unedited stereo recording with exact allocation of left and right channels, if Windows is running the file system. The cannot guarantee correct channel allocation.

  1. (only in the Professional and Ultimate versions) Click View > Raw Contents to enable maximum date resolution.

1. Open a terminal then "cd" into the directory that contains the .AU files.

2. Type the following command in a terminal to sort and rename the files into numerical timestamp order: mkdir "renamed" | find -type f -name "*.au" -printf "cp %h/%f renamed/%h/%TY%Tm%Td-%TH%TM%TS_%f\n"|sh

3. The file names produced in the "renamed" folder are not in a consecutive sequence suitable for the Audacity recovery utilities. Instead, use the plugin

• There is a 2 GB maximum size for any WAV file created from the reconstructed temporary files. This implies no more than 2000 .au files can be recovered. Sometimes (probably due to bugs in the utilities) there can be errors when recovering only 1000 or so files. In that case you would need to split the .au files in the temporary or_data folder into two or more folders, each containing consecutively numbered files, and recover a separate WAV file from each folder.

• Recovery of unedited mono recordings should be correct in most cases.

• Recovery of unedited stereo recordings may recover with transposed left/right channels in places. Channel allocation will only be correct if you are using the NTFS (Windows) or

There is no implication that these tools will necessarily do what you want, nor have they necessarily been tested by Audacity Team.

audacity_rescue.sh

This can reassemble a few thousand .au files. It may be simpler to apply (at a bash terminal) than some of the solutions mentioned on this page, particularly for mono recordings.

1. Using , make a copy of the temp directory and its files from a mono recording:

   cp -r /tmp/audacity1.2-jbn ~/rescue

2. Convert the AU files into raw (headerless) files. The files must already be time-sorted and numbered with leading zeroes:

   for f in *.au ; do sox ${f} -t raw ${f}.raw ; done

Audacity 3.3 was released on 24. Apr 2023

This release is mostly focused on under-the-hood changes

Changes

• Some of the built-in effects are now realtime capable (Bass & Treble, Distortion, Phaser, Reverb and Wahwah).

• #4352 Added a new effect: Shelf Filter.

• Added an initial (beta) version of Beats and Bars. See for further info.

• reworked the bottom toolbar dock:

  • Project Sample Rate is now found in Audio Setup -> Audio Settings (formerly known as Project Rate).

  • The Snapping Toolbar (formerly known as Snap-To) is now independent of the Selection Toolbar.
• Improved Zooming behavior slightly (more to come in the future).

• Added a new ruler, Linear (dB). This ruler goes from 0 dBFS to -∞ dBFS and better reflects the volume as shown in the recording/playback meters.

• When copying clips between projects, you now can choose between whether to copy smart clips or just the visible portion.

• added a delete button to the Cut/Copy/Paste toolbar.

• Audacity no longer dithers tracks unnecessarily.

• Linux playback now handles output latency better (less stutters).

• The EQ effect no longer resets clip names.

• FFmpeg 6 (avformat 60) is now supported.

• Moved from Breakpad to Crashpad.

• Extracted various libraries from within Audacity.

A full list of changes can be found .

Windows

• Audacity 3.3 is tested on Windows 10 & 11

  • Windows Vista, 7 and 8.1 should still work, but are no longer tested.

macOS / Mac OS X

• Audacity 3.3 is tested on macOS 12 & 13

  • OS X 10.9 and onwards should still work, but are no longer tested.

Linux

• In addition to the traditional update path via package managers, Audacity is distributed as an AppImage. The AppImage gets updated at the same time as the Windows and macOS versions, so if you collaborate with users on those platforms, you may want to use the AppImage over your distribution's package manager.

• Linux support is tested with AppImages on Ubuntu 20.04 & 22.04.

  • Other Linux distributions should work, but aren't tested by the Audacity team.

Audacity is not yet compatible with Conan 2.

Getting started

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Download and install the plugin which will help you check the levels of your recording.

If you are using a version of Audacity previous to 2.4.1 you will also need to download and install

Start this process with an unedited recording. No processing, adjustments or fixes.

Export a WAV (Microsoft) 16-bit sound file of your raw reading and save it in a safe place—ideally not on the machine. You should never be stuck reading a chapter again because of an accident. Saving an Audacity Project is not recommended for this.

To automate the audiobook mastering process, first download the macro:

Then, in Audacity, go to

Audacity 3.1.3 was released on 23. Dec 2021.

Audacity 3.1.3 is a patch release for Audacity 3.1.

It improves the following aspects:

• Improved performance. Loading in projects especially should now be up to 50x faster compared to 3.1.0.

The Audacity Wiki has been shut down.

You may find the information you were looking for in the following places:

A wikidump of the Audacity Wiki as of March 31, 2023 can be found . It can be accessed and worked with in the same way as .

In Audacity version 3.3.0, the Device preference page has been renamed to

To start editing, you need some sort of sound to edit. You can either , or import an existing sound file (for example, an MP3 or WAV) by dragging & dropping it into the project window. You can also import files via the File > Import menus.

Once you have that, you will see a waveform of your sound:

This waveform is a visual representation of the song. The larger the blue "blob" is, the louder the section. Lines standing alone ("spikes") indicate sudden and short loud sections such as clicks, snaps, claps and drum hits. With a bit of practice, you can use the waveform to quickly find your way around an audio file.

To remove a section of an audio file, first select the section by clicking and dragging in the waveform.