audacity (1)

NAME

       audacity - Graphical cross-platform audio editor

SYNOPSIS

       audacity [ 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.

       The  only  command-line arguments Audacity takes are the names of audio
       files to open.  Audacity currently uses libsndfile to open many  uncom-
       pressed  audio  formats  such  as WAV, AIFF, and AU, and it can also be
       linked to libmad and libvorbis to provide support for opening  MP3  and
       Ogg Vorbis files, respectively.

       If you specify multiple files on the command-line, Audacity will import
       all of them into the same project, which is convenient if you  want  to
       mix them.

       Audacity  is  an  interactive, graphical editor, not a batch-processing
       tool.  There are no options which make it easy to perform an  operation
       on  a  set  of  files.  If you need to batch-process audio or do simple
       edits from the command line, use sox.

FILES

       ~/.Audacity
              Per user configuration file.

       /tmp/audacity1.1-<user>/
              Default location of Audacity's temp directory, where  <user>  is
              your  username.   If  this  location is not suitable (not enough
              space in /tmp, for example), you should change the  temp  direc-
              tory  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 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.
              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.


       <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.

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

       See our website for details:

       http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

       The  most  serious  bug currently is that it does not gracefully handle
       running out of disk space.

AUTHORS

       Primary contributors include Dominic  Mazzoni,  Joshua  Haberman,  Matt
       Brubeck,  Shane Mueller, and Brian Gunlogson, but dozens of others have
       contributed, and Audacity would not be possible without wxWindows, lib-
       sndfile,  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/

                                                                   audacity(1)