Effects

Effects take audio that is already in the project and change it — its level, its frequency balance, its pitch and speed, or the space it appears to sit in. They are grouped into submenus by what they do, so that the ten or so effects you are choosing between at any moment are near each other.

Where to find them

The Effect menu, with audio selected. The menu opens with Plugin manager, Add realtime effects and Repeat last effect, then the group submenus: Volume and compression, Fading, Pitch and tempo, EQ and filters, Noise removal and repair, Delay and reverb, Distortion and modulation, Special, Spectral tools and Legacy.

Destructive and realtime

Applying an effect from the Effect menu rewrites the selected audio. The change can be undone, but until it is undone the audio in the project has really been altered.

Three of the effects — Compressor, Limiter and Reverb — can also run live on a track during playback without altering anything, added from the track’s effects panel rather than the menu. See Realtime Effects.

Applying a destructive effect

A destructive effect acts on the selection only, so a partial selection gives a partial change. Most open a dialog with an Apply button; a few, such as Fade In and Invert, have nothing to set and take effect as soon as they are chosen.

Realtime effects work differently: they are added to a track’s effect stack and applied during playback, without a selection and without altering the audio. See Realtime Effects.

Some effects are built into Audacity; the rest are Nyquist scripts that ship alongside it, as are the generators, analyzers and tools in the neighbouring sections.

• Realtime Effects Effects that process a track during playback instead of rewriting its audio.
• Volume & Compression Effects that set how loud audio is and how wide the gap between its loud and quiet parts.
• Fading Effects that ramp the level of a selection up or down, or cross one piece of audio into another.
• Pitch and Tempo Effects that change how fast audio plays, how high it sounds, or both.
• EQ and Filters Effects that change the balance between low, middle and high frequencies.
• Noise Removal & Repair Effects that clean up recordings — steady background noise, clicks, and short damaged passages.
• Delay and Reverb Effects that add repeats or a sense of space to a dry recording.
• Distortion and Modulation Effects that vary the signal over time or reshape it into something new.
• Special Small utility effects that transform a selection in one specific way.
• Spectral Tools Effects that act on a rectangle of time and frequency marked out in a spectrogram.
• Legacy Older effects kept for compatibility, superseded by newer equivalents.

Last updated 2 September 2026