audacity - Graphical cross-platform audio editor
audacity -help
audacity -version
audacity [-blocksize nnn] -test
audacity [-blocksize nnn] [
AUDIO-FILE ]
...
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 accessible from the
Help menu. This man page describes the Unix-specific features, including
special files and environment variables.
Audacity currently uses
libsndfile to open many uncompressed audio
formats 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 Vorbis, and FLAC files, respectively.
LAME, libvorbis, libflac and
libtwolame 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.
- -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
~/.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 recording 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.
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
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 alternatively 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 alternatively in a
nyquist directory on the search path if you choose to create one.
This man page documents audacity version 1.3.5
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.
For details of known problems, see the release notes and the audacity wiki:
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Known_Issues
To report a bug, see the instructions at
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Reporting_Bugs
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 wxWidgets, 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://www.audacityteam.org/about/credits/