Audacity (audio editor)

Audacity is a free and open-source digital audio editor and recording application software, available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems. The project was started in the fall of 1999 by Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg at Carnegie Mellon University, and released on May 28, 2000, as version 0.8.
As of March 2, 2022, Audacity is the most popular download at FossHub, with over 111.6 million downloads since March 2015. It was previously served from Google Code and SourceForge, where it was downloaded over 200 million times.
Audacity won the SourceForge 2007 and 2009 Community Choice Award for Best Project for Multimedia. It is licensed under GPL-2.0-or-later.
In 2019, then-lead developer James Crook started the fork DarkAudacity to experiment with a new look and other UX changes. Most of its changes were eventually incorporated into the mainline version and the fork ended.
In April 2021, it was announced that Muse Group (owners of MuseScore and Ultimate Guitar) would acquire the Audacity trademark and continue to develop the application, which remains free and open source.
== Features and use ==
In addition to recording audio from multiple sources, Audacity can be used for post-processing of all types of audio, including effects such as normalization, trimming, and fading in and out. It has been used to record and mix entire albums, such as by Tune-Yards. It is currently used in the Sound Creation unit of the UK OCR National Level 2 ICT course.
Audacity's features include:
* Recording and playing back sounds
** Scrubbing (Version 2.1.1 and later)
** Timer Record – schedule when a recording begins and ends, for unattended recording
** MIDI playback (version 2.2.0 on)
** Punch and Roll recording – for editing on-the-fly (version 2.3.0 on)
*Editing 
** Via cut, copy, and paste, with unlimited Undo levels
** Multitrack features including navigation controls, zoom and single-track edit, project pane and XY project navigation, non-destructive and destructive effect processing, audio file manipulation (cut, copy, paste)
** Amplitude envelope editing
** Precise adjustments to speed (tempo) while maintaining pitch, to synchronize audio with video or for precise running time
** Conversion of records, tapes or MiniDiscs to digital tracks by splitting the audio source into multiple tracks based on silences in the source material
* Cross-platform operation – versions for Windows, macOS, and Unix-like systems (including Linux and BSD). (It uses the wxWidgets software library for a similar graphical user interface on various operating systems.)
* Large array of digital effects and plug-ins. Additional effects can be written with Nyquist, a Lisp dialect.
** Built-in LADSPA, VST and Nyquist plug-in support
** Noise Reduction based on sampling the noise to be minimized
** Vocal Reduction and Isolation for creation of karaoke tracks and isolated vocal tracks
** Pitch adjustment maintaining speed, and speed adjustment maintaining pitch
** LADSPA, VST and Audio Unit (macOS) effects support real-time preview (version 2.1.0 on) (real-time preview does not yet support latency compensation)
** Saving and loading user presets for effect settings across sessions (version 2.1.0 on)
* Support for multi-channel modes with sampling rates up to 96 kHz with 32 bits per sample
* Audio spectrum analysis using the Fourier transform algorithm
* Importing and exporting WAV, AIFF, MP3 (via LAME encoder, now integrated), Ogg Vorbis, and all file formats supported by libsndfile library. Versions 1.3.2 and later supported Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC). Version 1.3.6 and later also supported additional formats such as WMA, AAC, AMR and AC3 via the optional FFmpeg library.
* Detection of dropout errors while recording with an overburdened CPU
* From 2.3.2 on, a mod-script-pipe for driving Audacity from Python (can be enabled in Preferences)
* Full user manual included with the application (Windows and Mac), available to download, or accessible online without downloading
** Most dialogs and error messages have a "?" help button to link the user to relevant pages in the manual
* Four user-selectable visual themes (version 2.2.0 on)
** Four user-selectable colorways for waveform display in audio tracks (version 2.2.1 on)
Audacity supports the LV2 open standard for plugins, and can therefore load software like Calf Studio Gear.
The version 3.0 update (March 2021) introduced a new project file format, .aup3, using an SQLite database to store each project in a single database file.
The 3.0.3 update (July 2021) introduced crash reporting and error reporting for database errors; optional update checking was also added.
Version 3.1.0 introduced:
* Grab-handle drag-bars for clips to make repositioning audio easier (replacing the Timeshift tool)
* Non-destructive clip editing
* Improved, more discoverable, looping
In April 2022, an official Audacity app was added to the Microsoft Store.
=== Limitations ===
Audacity does not support instrument VST (VSTi) plugins. There are no real-time track equalizers or other real-time effect slots for playback or recording. All such effects have to be rendered after recording/import. Audacity does not natively import or export WMA, AAC, AC3 or most other proprietary or restricted file formats; rather, an optional FFmpeg library is required.
== Language support ==
In addition to English, Audacity is available in Afrikaans, Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Corsican, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Marathi, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese and Welsh.
The documentation, the Audacity Manual, is available only in English. The Audacity Forum offers technical support in Spanish, French, Russian and German.
== In logo editing culture ==
Logo editors usually would use this tool if they are using AVS Video Editor. Or if the software that the person is using does not have a Pitch Shifting tool.
Category:Windows, macOS & Linux