Audacity/Introduction

Audacity is a free and open-source audio editing and recording program. It allows you to record live audio, convert tapes and records into digital recordings, edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF files, edit or mix sounds together, change the speed of recording, add effects and many other things.

Audacity's logo
Audacity's logo

Welcome to the book on Audacity!

Audacity's initial release was in May of 2000. Since then, it has become a very common audio editing application due to it's easy of use and free cost.

Feature Overview edit

Since the first release of Audacity, the list of features is growing. Here is a list of some of them:

  • Importing and exporting of Ogg Vorbis, WAV, AIFF, MP3 (via LAME), all formats supported by libsndfile and since 1.3.2 also FLAC
  • Sound recording and playing
  • Editing using cut, copy, paste with unlimited undo history
  • Multi-track mixing
  • A large array of digital effects and plug-ins, with possibility of writing you own using Nyquist
  • Amplitude envelope editing and noise removal
  • Support for multi-channel modes with sampling rates up to 96 kHz with 24 bits per sample