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.
33
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
46
49 ~/.audacity-data/audacity.cfg
50 Per user configuration file.
51 /var/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 /var/tmp, for example), you should change the temp
56 directory in the Preferences and restart Audacity. Audacity is
57 a disk-based editor, so the temp directory is very important: it
58 should always be on a fast (local) 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 On many modern Linux systems all files in /tmp/ will be deleted
65 each time the system boots up, which makes recovering a record‐
66 ing that was going on when the system crashed much harder. This
67 is why the default is to use a directory in /var/tmp/ which will
68 not normally be deleted by the system. Open the Preferences to
69 check.
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72 When looking for plug-ins, help files, localization files, or other
73 configuration files, Audacity searches the following locations, in this
74 order:
75 AUDACITY_PATH
77 Any directories in the AUDACITY_PATH environment variable will
78 be searched before anywhere else.
79 .
81 The current working directory when Audacity is started.
82 ~/.audacity-data/Plug-Ins
84 <prefix>/share/audacity
86 The system-wide Audacity directory, where <prefix> is usually
87 /usr or /usr/local, depending on where the program was
88 installed.
89 <prefix>/share/doc/audacity
91 The system-wide Audacity documentation directory, where <prefix>
92 is usually /usr or /usr/local, depending on where the program
93 was installed.
94 For localization files in particular (i.e. translations of Audacity
96 into other languages), Audacity also searches <prefix>/share/locale
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100 Audacity supports two types of plug-ins on Unix: LADSPA and Nyquist
101 plug-ins. These are generally placed in a directory called plug-ins
102 somewhere on the search path (see above).
103 LADSPA plug-ins can either be in the plug-ins directory, or alterna‐
105 tively in a ladspa directory on the search path if you choose to create
106 one. Audacity will also search the directories in the LADSPA_PATH
107 environment variable for additional LADSPA plug-ins.
108 Nyquist plug-ins can either be in the plug-ins directory, or alterna‐
110 tively in a nyquist directory on the search path if you choose to cre‐
111 ate one.
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115 This man page documents audacity version 1.3.5
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119 Audacity is distributed under the GPL, however some of the libraries it
120 links to are distributed under other free licenses, including the LGPL
121 and BSD licenses.
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125 For details of known problems, see the release notes and the audacity
126 wiki:
127 http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Known_Issues
128 To report a bug, see the instructions at
130 http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Reporting_Bugs
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134 Project leaders include Dominic Mazzoni, Matt Brubeck, James Crook,
135 Vaughan Johnson, Leland Lucius, and Markus Meyer, but dozens of others
136 have contributed, and Audacity would not be possible without wxWidgets,
137 libsndfile, and many of the other libraries it is built upon. For the
138 most recent list of contributors and current email addresses, see our
139 website:
140 http://www.audacityteam.org/about/credits/
142 audacity(1)