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 a
ll of the features of Audac
ity 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-speci
fic features, including spe
cial files and environment variables.
Audacity currently uses libsndfile to open many uncompressed audio format
s such as WAV, AIFF, and AU,
and it can also be linked to libmad, libvorbis, and libflac, to provid
e support for opening MP2/3,
Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC files, respectively. LAME, libvorbis, libflac and l
ibtwolame provide facilities
to export files to all these formats as well.
Audacity is primarily an interactive, graphical editor, not a batch-proc
essing tool. Whilst there is
a basic batch processing tool it is experimental and incomplete. If you n
eed to batch-process audio
or do simple edits from the command line, using sox or ecasound driven b
y 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 by
tes

FILES
~/.audacity-data/audacity.cfg
Per user configuration file.
/var/tmp/audacity-<user>/
Default location of Audacity's temp directory, where <user> is you
r username. If this loca
 tion 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 (l
ocal) disk with lots of free
space.
Note that older versions of Audacity put the temp directory inside
of the user's home direc
tory. This is undesirable on many systems, and using some directo
ry in /tmp is recommended.
On many modern Linux systems all files in /tmp/ will be deleted ea
ch time the system boots up,
which makes recovering a recording that was going on when the syst
em crashed much harder. This
is why the default is to use a directory in /var/tmp/ which wil
l 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 con
figuration 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 <pr
efix> 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 pl
ug-ins. These are generally
placed in a directory called plug-ins somewhere on the search path (see a
bove).
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 s
earch 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 alternativel
y in a nyquist directory on
the search path if you choose to create 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 wik
i:
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, Vaugh
an Johnson, Leland Lucius,
and Markus Meyer, but dozens of others have contributed, and Audacity w
ould 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)