NAME

       audacity - Graphical cross-platform audio editor

SYNOPSIS

       audacity -help
       audacity -version

       audacity [-blocksize nnn] -test
       audacity [-blocksize nnn] [ AUDIO-FILE ] ...

DESCRIPTION

       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.

       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 MP2/3, Ogg
       Vorbis, and FLAC files, respectively.  LAME, libvorbis, libflac  and  libtwolame  provide  facilities  to
       export files to all these formats as well.

       Audacity  is  primarily  an interactive, graphical editor, not a batch-processing tool. Whilst there is a
       basic batch processing tool it is experimental and incomplete. If you need to batch-process audio  or  do
       simple  edits  from  the  command  line,  using sox or ecasound driven by a bash script will be much more
       powerful than audacity.

OPTIONS

       -help     display a brief list of command line options

       -version  display the audacity version number

       -test     run self diagnostics tests (only present in development builds)

       -blocksize nnn
                 set the audacity block size for writing files to disk to nnn bytes

FILES

       ~/.audacity-data/audacity.cfg
              Per user configuration file.

       /var/tmp/audacity-<user>/
              Default location of Audacity's temp directory, where <user> is your username.  If this location is
              not  suitable (not enough space in /var/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 (local) 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.

              On many modern Linux systems all files in /tmp/ will be deleted each time  the  system  boots  up,
              which  makes recovering a recording that was going on when the system crashed much harder. This is
              why the default is to use a directory in /var/tmp/ which will  not  normally  be  deleted  by  the
              system. Open the Preferences to check.

SEARCH PATH

       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-data/Plug-Ins

       <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

PLUG-INS

       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.

VERSION

       This man page documents audacity version 1.3.5

LICENSE

       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.

BUGS

       For details of known problems, see the release notes and the audacity wiki:
       http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Known_Issues

       To report a bug, see the instructions at
       http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Reporting_Bugs

AUTHORS

       Project leaders include Dominic Mazzoni, Matt Brubeck, James Crook, Vaughan Johnson, Leland  Lucius,  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://www.audacityteam.org/about/credits/

                                                                                                     audacity(1)