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 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 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 edi-
              tor, 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 sys-
              tems, 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.

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-files

       <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 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  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/

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