Tracks

The Tracks menu covers the tracks themselves rather than the audio inside them: adding new tracks to record or paste into, duplicating and removing existing ones, and mixing several tracks down into one.

Commands here act on the tracks you have selected. Selecting a track is different from selecting a time range — see Select all tracks.

New mono track

Adds a new, empty mono track below the existing tracks. A mono track holds a single channel of audio — the usual choice for a microphone or any other single-source recording. Shortcut:

Ctrl+Shift+N.

The new track is empty and ready to record or paste into. To record into it, select it first, then start recording — see Record on current track.

New stereo track

Adds a new, empty stereo track below the existing tracks. A stereo track holds a left and a right channel, which stay together as one track through editing and playback.

Choose stereo when the source has two channels — a stereo interface input, a music file, or desktop audio. Pasting stereo audio into a mono track prompts you first, since the two channels have to be combined.

New label track

Adds a new label track. Label tracks hold text markers rather than audio, letting you annotate points or ranges in the project — verse boundaries, retakes, edit notes.

You do not have to create a label track by hand first: adding a label with Add label creates one if the project has none. Labels can be exported as a text file from File → Export other → Export labels.

Duplicate

Copies each selected track, contents and all, into a new track below it. The copies are independent — editing one leaves the original untouched.

Useful before a destructive edit you might want to back out of: duplicate the track, work on the copy, and mute or remove whichever version you don’t keep. Nothing happens if no track is selected.

Remove tracks

Deletes the selected tracks from the project, along with all the audio, labels and effects on them. The tracks below move up to close the gap.

This removes whole tracks, not a time range — to delete part of a track’s audio, use Delete instead. Nothing happens if no track is selected, and the removal can be undone.

Mix-down to…

Combines the selected tracks into one, mixing their audio together as playback would. The result replaces the separate tracks with a single mono or stereo track.

Mixing down bakes in the current volume, pan and effect settings of each track, so it is worth duplicating the tracks first if you may want to adjust the balance later. Exporting a project mixes down automatically without changing your tracks — see Export audio.

Align content

Not yet enabled in the current Audacity 4 alpha.

A submenu of commands for lining up the content of selected tracks: aligning clips end to end, aligning them together, or aligning their start or end to zero, to the playhead, or to the end of the selection. The submenu is present in the menu bar but greyed out in the current alpha.

Until these commands are enabled you can position clips by dragging them, with snapping on to line them up precisely — see Snapping.

Sort tracks

Not yet enabled in the current Audacity 4 alpha.

A submenu with two commands for reordering the tracks in the project: by the time their audio starts, or alphabetically by track name. The submenu is present in the menu bar but greyed out in the current alpha.

Tracks can be reordered by hand in the meantime by dragging them in the track control panel.

Last updated 3 September 2026