audacity(1)                 General Commands Manual                audacity(1)



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 accessi-
       ble from the Help menu.  This man page describes the Unix-specific fea-
       tures, including special files and environment variables.

       Audacity currently uses libsndfile to open many uncompressed audio for-
       mats 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 Vor-
       bis, and FLAC files, respectively.  LAME, libvorbis, libflac and  libt-
       wolame 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 record-
              ing 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 alterna-
       tively 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  alterna-
       tively  in a nyquist directory on the search path if you choose to cre-
       ate 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)
