Audacity Reference Manual

Audacity 3.6 Reference Manual

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) - most common questions are answered in the FAQ

■ Visit the Forum for technical help ■ Using Help Resources ■ Check out written guides and video tutorials

■ How to use Audacity      ■ Tutorials for Audacity      ■ Searching the Manual

Guide to the Audacity Project Window

1 Menu Bar   2 Transport Toolbar   3 Tools Toolbar   4 Edit Toolbar   5 Audio Setup Toolbar   6 Share Audio Toolbar  

7 Recording Meter Toolbar   8 Playback Meter Toolbar   9 Timeline context menu   10 Timeline  

11 Track Control Panel   12 Vertical Scale   13 Audio Track   14 Label Track  

15 Time Signature Toolbar   16 Snapping Toolbar   17 Time Toolbar   18 Selection Toolbar   19 Play-at-Speed Toolbar   20 Status Bar  

Hover over and click on the image to learn more. Skip the image

This image (and many other waveform images in the manual) has RMS display turned on, the light color in the center of the waveform. The RMS display is now off by default but you can enable with View > Show RMS in Waveform. See RMS display for more details.

Help buttons

• Some places in Audacity have a help button, click for the relevant Manual page.

Additional Menus on Mac

• Audacity
• Window

Audacity Reference Guide

Audacity Fundamentals

• Managing Audacity Projects - Audacity's internal workspace
• Preferences - changing your settings
• Toolbars Overview - including how to arrange Toolbars
• Resetting Audacity to default settings - Preferences, Toolbars and Export settings
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Mouse bindings
• Effects, Generators and Analyzers
  • Plugin Manager - add/remove Effects, Generators and Analyzers
• Macros - for batch processing and effects automation
• Nyquist - for scripting and creating plugins

Audacity Tracks

• Audio Tracks
  • Waveform view
  • Spectrogram view
  • Multi-view
  • Track Control Panel and Vertical Scale
  • Clips - individual sections within an Audio Track
• Label Tracks
• Note Tracks (MIDI) - these contain data from MIDI (and Allegro) files
• Time Tracks - used for varying speed control
• Mixer - analogous to a hardware mixer board

Index, Glossary and More

• Subject Index
• Glossary of Terms
• Credits

• Audacity License
• Privacy Notice

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Links: Most links are to other pages in this Manual. Italicized  links are to pages external to this Manual, mostly to our main website or tutorials site. We are not responsible for the content of any other external sites.

Screenshots: Most screenshots in this Manual are of Audacity running under its default settings on the Microsoft Windows 10® operating system.

Copyright: Pages in this Manual are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. In essence, you are free to (1) copy, distribute and transmit the work (2) to adapt the work, under condition you must attribute the work to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). For any reuse or distribution, you may not remove our copyright notice and must make clear to others the license terms of this work.