New...
Creates a new empty project window.
Open...
Selecting Open presents you with a dialog where you can choose a file to open. If the current project window is empty, the new file will take over the current window, otherwise a new project window will be opened. The file formats recognized by Audacity are WAV, AIFF, NeXT/AU, IRCAM, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, MIDI, and the Audacity Project file format (AUP). In addition, Audacity can also attempt to open an audio file in a different format, as long as it is uncompressed - to do this, use the Import Raw Data command.
Close
Closes the current project window.
Save
Saves the current Audacity project (AUP) file. Audacity projects are not intended to be read by other programs, but they are extremely fast to load and save within Audacity. When you are finished working on a project and you want to be able to use it in another program, select Export instead. Note that most of the audio data for an Audacity project is not stored in the AUP file, but in a directory (folder) with the same name as the project. For example, if you save a project as chanson.aup, there will be a directory called chanson_data created to store the actual audio tracks of the project. For more information on the project file format, see the file formats page.
Save As...
Saves the current Audacity project (AUP) file, allowing you to give it a different name or move it to a new location if you have already saved it in one location. Audacity projects are not intended to be read by other programs, but they are extremely fast to load and save within Audacity. When you are finished working on a project and you want to be able to use it in another program, select Export instead. For more information on the project file format, see the file formats page.
Export...
Exports the current Audacity project as a standard audio file format such as WAV or AIFF. Unfortunately, exporting to MP3 is not possible at this time, so if you want to create an MP3 file, you must first export to a WAV or AIFF file and then use a separate MP3 encoder.
If there are multiple tracks of the same channel in your project, they will be automatically mixed in the exported data. For more information about mixing, see Quick Mix. To export only a single track, use Export Selection.
Export Selection...
This is the same as Export, but it only exports the part of the project that is selected. This is very useful if you want to save a small clip from part of a track as a separate file.
Export Labels...
If you have any Label Tracks, this command will export them as a text file. This feature is commonly used in Speech Recognition research to annotate a speech utterance and export the annotation to be later processed by another program. To import these labels into a different project later, use the Import Labels command.
Preferences
Opens a dialog window that lets you configure Audacity. For more information on the different preferences, see the section on Audacity Preferences.
Exit/Quit
Closes all project windows and exits Audacity.