Customization

Customizable Keyboard Shortcuts
You can use keyboard combinations to perform many actions in Audacity; for example pressing CTRL + 1 on the keyboard zooms in a step. The combinations associated with different commands can be changed or added to on the Keyboard Preferences tab.

Mouse clicks and movements can also be used to perform some actions. The Mouse Preferences tab lists the mouse gestures which are available but these cannot be changed at the moment.

Plug-ins
Audacity can be customized by the addition of plug-ins.
 * Nyquist: A number of Nyquist plug-ins are already included with Audacity which you'll see in the Audacity plug-ins folder with a file name ending in ".ny". Nyquist is a dialect of LISP specially developed for audio processing. It can generate or process sound effects, or analyze audio content. You can download additional Nyquist plug-ins from us, or create new ones in any text editor.
 * Other plug-in formats: LADSPA and VST effects are other types of plug-in which can be added to Audacity - see the Audacity plug-ins page for details. It's also now possible to add   VAMP plug-ins to Audacity – these are used to output descriptive information about the selected audio. Mac users can also add Audio Unit plug-ins.

Ultimate Customization
Anyone can download our source code. Changing the code and recompiling Audacity allows you to change any aspect of its behavior or turn on experimental or optional features.

See our guides to compiling Audacity for Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux on the Audacity Wiki. If you need help compiling, please ask on the Compiling Audacity board on our Forum.

If you are interested in working with the Audacity codebase please consider joining our Developer Community. Your code changes can then potentially be incorporated into Audacity for the benefit of all users.