1audacity(1)                 General Commands Manual                audacity(1)
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NAME

6       audacity - Graphical cross-platform audio editor
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SYNOPSIS

9       audacity -help
10       audacity -version
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12       audacity [-blocksize nnn] -test
13       audacity [-blocksize nnn] [ AUDIO-FILE ] ...
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DESCRIPTION

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.
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22       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.
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28       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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OPTIONS

36       -help     display a brief list of command line options
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38       -version  display the audacity version number
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40       -test     run  self  diagnostics  tests  (only  present  in development
41                 builds)
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43       -blocksize nnn
44                 set the audacity block size for writing files to disk to  nnn
45                 bytes
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FILES

49       ~/.audacity-data/audacity.cfg
50              Per user configuration file.
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52       /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.
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60              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.
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64              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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SEARCH PATH

72       When  looking  for  plug-ins,  help files, localization files, or other
73       configuration files, Audacity searches the following locations, in this
74       order:
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76       AUDACITY_PATH
77              Any  directories  in the AUDACITY_PATH environment variable will
78              be searched before anywhere else.
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80       .
81              The current working directory when Audacity is started.
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83       ~/.audacity-data/Plug-Ins
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85       <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.
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90       <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.
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95       For localization files in particular  (i.e.  translations  of  Audacity
96       into other languages), Audacity also searches <prefix>/share/locale
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PLUG-INS

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).
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104       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.
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109       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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VERSION

115       This man page documents audacity version 1.3.5
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LICENSE

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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123

BUGS

125       For details of known problems, see the release notes and  the  audacity
126       wiki:
127       http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Known_Issues
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129       To report a bug, see the instructions at
130       http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Reporting_Bugs
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AUTHORS

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:
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141       http://www.audacityteam.org/about/credits/
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147                                                                   audacity(1)
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