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://www.audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Known_Issues

       To report a bug, see the instructions at
       http://www.audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=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 wxWindows, 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://audacity.sourceforge.net/about/credits/

                                                                                      audacity(1)