1audacity(1) General Commands Manual audacity(1)
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6 audacity - Graphical cross-platform audio editor
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9 audacity -help
10 audacity -version
11 audacity [-blocksize nnn] -test
13 audacity [-blocksize nnn] [ AUDIO-FILE ] ...
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16 Audacity is a graphical audio editor. This man page does not describe
17 all of the features of Audacity or how to use it; for this, see the
18 html documentation that came with the program, which should be accessi‐
19 ble from the Help menu. This man page describes the Unix-specific fea‐
20 tures, including special files and environment variables.
21 Audacity currently uses libsndfile to open many uncompressed audio for‐
23 mats such as WAV, AIFF, and AU, and it can also be linked to libmad,
24 libvorbis, and libflac, to provide support for opening MP2/3, Ogg Vor‐
25 bis, and FLAC files, respectively. LAME, libvorbis, libflac and libt‐
26 wolame provide facilities to export files to all these formats as well.
27 Audacity is primarily an interactive, graphical editor, not a batch-
29 processing tool. Whilst there is a basic batch processing tool it is
30 experimental and incomplete. If you need to batch-process audio or do
31 simple edits from the command line, using sox or ecasound driven by a
32 bash script will be much more powerful than audacity.
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36 -help display a brief list of command line options
37 -version display the audacity version number
39 -test run self diagnostics tests (only present in development
41 builds)
42 -blocksize nnn
44 set the audacity block size for writing files to disk to nnn
45 bytes
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49 ~/.audacity-data/audacity.cfg
50 Per user configuration file.
51 /tmp/audacity-<user>/
53 Default location of Audacity's temp directory, where <user> is
54 your username. If this location is not suitable (not enough
55 space in /tmp, for example), you should change the temp direc‐
56 tory in the Preferences and restart Audacity. Audacity is a
57 disk-based editor, so the temp directory is very important: it
58 should always be on a fast disk with lots of free space.
59 Note that older versions of Audacity put the temp directory
61 inside of the user's home directory. This is undesirable on
62 many systems, and using some directory in /tmp is recommended.
63 Open the Preferences to check.
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66 When looking for plug-ins, help files, localization files, or other
67 configuration files, Audacity searches the following locations, in this
68 order:
69 AUDACITY_PATH
71 Any directories in the AUDACITY_PATH environment variable will
72 be searched before anywhere else.
73 .
75 The current working directory when Audacity is started.
76 ~/.audacity-files
78 <prefix>/share/audacity
80 The system-wide Audacity directory, where <prefix> is usually
81 /usr or /usr/local, depending on where the program was
82 installed.
83 <prefix>/share/doc/audacity
85 The system-wide Audacity documentation directory, where <prefix>
86 is usually /usr or /usr/local, depending on where the program
87 was installed.
88 For localization files in particular (i.e. translations of Audacity
90 into other languages), Audacity also searches <prefix>/share/locale
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94 Audacity supports two types of plug-ins on Unix: LADSPA and Nyquist
95 plug-ins. These are generally placed in a directory called plug-ins
96 somewhere on the search path (see above).
97 LADSPA plug-ins can either be in the plug-ins directory, or alterna‐
99 tively in a ladspa directory on the search path if you choose to create
100 one. Audacity will also search the directories in the LADSPA_PATH
101 environment variable for additional LADSPA plug-ins.
102 Nyquist plug-ins can either be in the plug-ins directory, or alterna‐
104 tively in a nyquist directory on the search path if you choose to cre‐
105 ate one.
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109 This man page documents audacity version 1.3.5
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113 Audacity is distributed under the GPL, however some of the libraries it
114 links to are distributed under other free licenses, including the LGPL
115 and BSD licenses.
116
119 For details of known problems, see the release notes and the audacity
120 wiki:
121 http://www.audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Known_Issues
122 To report a bug, see the instructions at
124 http://www.audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Reporting_Bugs
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128 Project leaders include Dominic Mazzoni, Matt Brubeck, James Crook,
129 Vaughan Johnson, Leland Lucius, and Markus Meyer, but dozens of others
130 have contributed, and Audacity would not be possible without wxWindows,
131 libsndfile, and many of the other libraries it is built upon. For the
132 most recent list of contributors and current email addresses, see our
133 website:
134 http://audacity.sourceforge.net/about/credits/
136 audacity(1)