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 accessi-
ble from the Help menu. This man page describes the Unix-specific fea-
tures, including special files and environment variables.
Audacity currently uses libsndfile to open many uncompressed audio for-
mats 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 Vor-
bis, 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 di-
rectory 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 in-
side 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 record-
ing 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-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 in-
stalled.
<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 en-
vironment 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.
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://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Known_Issues
To report a bug, see the instructions at
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/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 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/
audacity(1)
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