1audacity(1) General Commands Manual audacity(1)
2
6 audacity - Graphical cross-platform audio editor
7
9 audacity [ AUDIO-FILE ] ...
10
12 Audacity is a graphical audio editor. This man page does not describe
13 all of the features of Audacity or how to use it; for this, see the
14 html documentation that came with the program, which should be accessi‐
15 ble from the Help menu. This man page describes the Unix-specific fea‐
16 tures, including special files and environment variables.
17 The only command-line arguments Audacity takes are the names of audio
19 files to open. Audacity currently uses libsndfile to open many uncom‐
20 pressed audio formats such as WAV, AIFF, and AU, and it can also be
21 linked to libmad, libvorbis, and libflac, to provide support for open‐
22 ing MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC files, respectively.
23 If you specify multiple files on the command-line, Audacity will import
25 all of them into the same project, which is convenient if you want to
26 mix them.
27 Audacity is an interactive, graphical editor, not a batch-processing
29 tool. There are no options that make it easy to perform an operation
30 on a set of files. If you need to batch-process audio or do simple
31 edits from the command line, use sox.
32
35 ~/.audacity
36 Per user configuration file.
37 /tmp/audacity1.2-<user>/
39 Default location of Audacity's temp directory, where <user> is
40 your username. If this location is not suitable (not enough
41 space in /tmp, for example), you should change the temp direc‐
42 tory in the Preferences and restart Audacity. Audacity is a
43 disk-based editor, so the temp directory is very important: it
44 should always be on a fast disk with lots of free space.
45 Note that older versions of Audacity put the temp directory
47 inside of the user's home directory. This is undesirable on
48 many systems, and using some directory in /tmp is recommended.
49 Open the Preferences to check.
50
52 When looking for plug-ins, help files, localization files, or other
53 configuration files, Audacity searches the following locations, in this
54 order:
55 AUDACITY_PATH
57 Any directories in the AUDACITY_PATH environment variable will
58 be searched before anywhere else.
59 .
61 The current working directory when Audacity is started.
62 ~/.audacity-files
64 <prefix>/share/audacity
66 The system-wide Audacity directory, where <prefix> is usually
67 /usr or /usr/local, depending on where the program was
68 installed.
69 <prefix>/share/doc/audacity
71 The system-wide Audacity documentation directory, where <prefix>
72 is usually /usr or /usr/local, depending on where the program
73 was installed.
74 For localization files in particular (i.e. translations of Audacity
76 into other languages), Audacity also searches <prefix>/share/locale
77
80 Audacity supports two types of plug-ins on Unix: LADSPA and Nyquist
81 plug-ins. These are generally placed in a directory called plug-ins
82 somewhere on the search path (see above).
83 LADSPA plug-ins can either be in the plug-ins directory, or alterna‐
85 tively in a ladspa directory on the search path if you choose to create
86 one. Audacity will also search the directories in the LADSPA_PATH
87 environment variable for additional LADSPA plug-ins.
88 Nyquist plug-ins can either be in the plug-ins directory, or alterna‐
90 tively in a nyquist directory on the search path if you choose to cre‐
91 ate one.
92
95 Audacity is distributed under the GPL, however some of the libraries it
96 links to are distributed under other free licenses, including the LGPL
97 and BSD licenses.
98
101 See our website for details:
102 http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
104 The most serious bug currently is that it does not gracefully handle
106 running out of disk space.
107
110 Primary contributors include Dominic Mazzoni, Joshua Haberman, Matt
111 Brubeck, Shane Mueller, Brian Gunlogson, Vaughan Johnson, Greg Mekkes,
112 James Crook, and Markus Meyer, but dozens of others have contributed,
113 and Audacity would not be possible without wxWindows, libsndfile, and
114 many of the other libraries it is built upon. For the most recent list
115 of contributors and current email addresses, see our website:
116 http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
118 audacity(1)