About Audacity

Where to get it
The Audacity program is available from the Audacity downloads page at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/.

Features
Audacity is a fast multi-track audio editor and recorder for:


 * Windows 98 and later
 * Macintosh OS 9 (Audacity 1.0 only) and OS X
 * Linux/Unix and other *.nix-based systems

Audacity supports several digital audio formats with support for 24 bit and 32 bit sample formats as well as 16 bit. Supported formats include:


 * WAV
 * AIFF
 * OGG
 * MP3

Professional features include:
 * Envelope editing.
 * Built-in effects processing.
 * Mixing of tracks.
 * Recording overdubs while playing previously recorded tracks.

For sound analysis you may use the spectrogram mode or a spectrum analyzer window. Also Audacity has built-in effects and supports the following plug-ins (providing additional effects and processing):


 * LADSPA Plug-ins
 * Nyquist Plug-ins
 * VST Plug-ins  Windows and Mac only 
 * Vamp Plug-ins current Audacity and legacy 1.3.4 and later only

Short history
Audacity was started by Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg in the fall of 1999 as part of a research project at Carnegie Mellon University. Audacity was initially released as an open-source audio editor at SourceForge.net in May 2000.

We got to version Audacity 1.0 of by June 2002. This version was downloaded well over a million times and was widely regarded as a useful and very promising program.

Subsequently other people started helping with development. Less than a year and a half later, we introduced the Audacity 1.2 series, containing hundreds more features, complete support for professional-quality 24-bit and 32-bit audio, a complete Manual and support for many different languages. 1.2.6 was downloaded over 40 million times.

Since then, we produced a successful Beta 1.3 series with significantly enhanced features which served as the starting point for the current 2.0 series..

Dozens of people have contributed to Audacity over the years and today, Audacity is being developed by a team of volunteers located in many different countries. Audacity is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). You are free to use this program for any personal, educational or commercial purpose. Audacity is now localized to many languages other than English.

Information and Questions
For additional information check out the current Audacity features.

If you have questions, try our Frequently Asked Questions, explore this Wiki for tips and tricks or visit the official Forum for help.

If you would like to join us as a new developer, please see our Developer Guide. There are also many other ways you can contribute to Audacity.

Nabble hosts archives of most of our public mailing lists, although of those, only the audacity-devel, audacity-translation and audacity-users lists are currently active. You can register with Nabble to participate online in those lists, or subscribe directly by e-mail to any of our public mailing lists.

{{ednote|Gale 27Mar13: The below article no longer seems to be on the PCmech site.

Other articles about Audacity

 * PCmech.com http://pcmech.com/show/opensource/672/ }}