Analyze Menu

Audacity's Analysis Tools

 * There are three built-in LADSPA analysis tools: Contrast, Plot Spectrum and Find Clipping
 * There are five Nyquist plug-in analysis tools shipped with Audacity: Beat Finder, Regular Interval Labels, Sample Data Export, Silence Finder and Sound Finder
 * Vamp Analysis Plug-ins can also be added.

Manage...
Selecting this option from the Analyze Menu (or the Effect Menu or Generate Menu) takes you to a dialog which enables you to load and unload Analyzers (and Effects and Generators) from Audacity. This enables you to customize your Analyze Menu making it shorter or longer as required. For details see Manage Effects, Generators and Analyzers.

Contrast... 
Analyzes a selected, single non-stereo audio track to determine the average rms difference in volume (contrast) between foreground (the speech) and background (music, audience noise or similar). The purpose is to determine if the speech will be intelligible to the hard of hearing.

Plot Spectrum...
Takes the selected audio (which is a set of sound pressure values at points in time) and converts it to a graph of frequencies (the horizontal scale in Hz) against amplitudes (the vertical scale in dB).



Find Clipping...
Displays runs of clipped samples in a Label Track, as a screen-reader accessible alternative to View > Show Clipping. A run must include at least one clipped sample, but may include unclipped samples too.

Nyquist Plug-in analysis tools shipped with Audacity


Beat Finder...
Attempts to place labels at beats which are much louder than the surrounding audio. It's a fairly rough and ready tool, and won't necessarily work well on a typical modern pop music track with compressed dynamic range.



Regular Interval Labels...
Places labels in a long track so as to divide it into smaller, equally sized segments. For example, this can be useful for distributing a large file on the internet. You can either choose the number of labels to be created, or the interval between them. Each label produced contains the chosen label text.



Sample Data Export...
Reads the values of successive samples from the selected audio and prints this data to a plain text, CSV or HTML file.



Silence Finder...
Divides a track up by placing point labels inside areas of silence. Use this if you just want to split the recording into tracks at a specific point without removing the silences between them.



Sound Finder...
Divides a track up by placing region labels for areas of sound that are separated by silence. Use this to make the labels show the exact region of each track to be exported. This lets you remove some or all of the silence between the tracks.

Vamp Analysis Plug-ins
You can also add some additional analysis tools in the Vamp plug-in format for viewing and analysing the descriptive contents of music audio files. Typical things that a Vamp plug-in might calculate include the locations of moments such as note onset times and power or fundamental frequency data.

To run a Vamp plug-in, select the audio and run the plug-in from the menu. An annotated label track appears showing the result. At this time, Audacity cannot display graphical output such as histograms or curves.