Interface Preferences

From Audacity Manual

Behaviors

• Update display while playing: This steps the timeline to left during play or recording, so that the playback or recording cursor remains visible. Most users would keep this enabled, but on slower computers turning it off can prevent interrupted playback or recording. Turning it off allows you to drag the horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of the screen to a new playback position then restart playback from there.
• Closing last window quits Audacity: Sets Audacity to quit when the last project window you are working with is closed. Unchecking this can be useful as it lets you use File > Close to close the last window and then create a new empty Project. To shut Audacity down with this preference unchecked, you must use File > Exit (on a Mac, Audacity > Quit Audacity) or the respective shortcut.
• Enable dragging left and right selection edges: Lets you expand or contract existing selection areas with the mouse after they have been created. If unchecked you must use the Selection Bar or keyboard to modify existing selection areas. See Audacity Selection for further details.
• Ergonomic order of audio I/O buttons: Sets the Control Toolbar button order as: Pause, Play, Stop, Skip to Start, Skip to End, Record, rather than: Skip to Start, Play, Record, Pause, Stop, Skip to End.
• Automatically fit tracks vertically zoomed: Tracks will be automatically resized to fill the vertical space on screen without scrolling.
• "Move track focus" cycles repeatedly through tracks: When using the up and down arrow keys to change which track is focused, moving the focus off one end (top or bottom) makes the focus jump to the other end.
• Editing a clip can move other clips: This ensures that when cutting and pasting audio in or to left of a clip, clips or audio to the right of the edit point can move, and the total length of the track change accordingly. Unchecking this option pins the clips so that they can't move. Therefore if you are cutting, space will be created, and if there is insufficient space to paste, an error message will display.
• Select all audio in project, if none selected: If you select no audio before applying an effect, the effect will be automatically applied to all audio in all tracks. This also applies to other menu items requiring an audio selection to be made. If this preference is unchecked, all menu items requiring an audio selection will remain grayed out until audio is selected.
• Beep on completion of longer activities: Audacity makes a quiet system beep after completion of longer tasks. Visually impaired users may find this useful, though the beep may not be audible on all computers.

Show / Hide

• Enable cut lines: Displays a light blue vertical line at the left edge of a cut edit, which changes to red after clicking elsewhere in the track. Click on the line at any time to restore the cut audio; if you restore in error, use Edit > Undo Expand to get the cut line back. To remove the line without restoring audio, right-click over it. Edit > Undo Remove will restore the line if you make a mistake.
• Show warnings about temp files: ??? When Audacity starts up, tells you if there were files 'left over' from a previous run of Audacity.

• Show prompt to save, even if project is empty: Most users should leave this option enabled, so that Audacity warns you if you try to exit an unsaved project with no tracks in it. You should not save an empty project, as Audacity saves exactly what you see on the screen. If you see this warning that "Saved project will be empty", follow the instructions by clicking "Cancel", use Edit > Undo to restore the tracks you want to save, then File > Save Project.
• Show Welcome Message at program start up: Displays a "Welcome Screen" with useful hints for new users on topics such as recording and playback, editing, exporting and CD burning. If you turn the Welcome Message off, you can still access it from the Help menu.

Modes

• CleanSpeech Mode: A customization of Audacity by Lynn Allan with limited menu options. It's mainly used for quick clean-up and MP3 export of a number of speech recordings, carried out as a batch process. The available effects in the "CleanSpeech" batch chain are limited to Fade In, Fade Out, Leveller, Noise Removal, Normalize, Stereo to Mono and Truncate Silence. A simple "MP3 Conversion" chain is also provided which has only a Normalize effect.

• To run a CleanSpeech or MP3 Conversion chain with CleanSpeech Mode enabled, click File > CleanSpeech Chain. In the "Apply Chain" dialog that pops up, select one of the chains and apply it either to the current project or to files. If you apply the chain to files, these will be imported into Audacity for processing. To edit the parameters for the chains, or to add a new one, click File > Edit Chains... .

Display range minimum:

• Sets the minimum displayed value of the Meter Toolbar, and of the vertical logarithmic scale in the Waveform (dB) track display (this display is enabled in the Track Drop-Down Menu). -60 dB is the default value. The chosen value affects the gradation ticks and values displayed on the meter, according to whether it is at default size or dragged out to give longer scales.

Other interface choices

• Language: This drop-down menu changes the language of the menus and other on-screen text. Languages with unusual character sets require you to have the correct fonts installed on your system, otherwise the menus will display with ???? characters.

• Help:
  • "Standard" is what most people will want: Audacity will show help in its built-in browser, using HTML files stored on your computer.
  • "In Browser" is similar, except the same files are displayed in your default web browser.
  • "Internet" will always use the latest help files from the internet, opening your default browser to do this.

• Solo Button: The "Solo" button on the Track Panels can behave in three different ways:
  • "Standard" will suit those used to mixing desks and other professional audio software. Any number of tracks can be made solo so that they mix together, but if any solo button is down, the mute buttons have no effect. If on any occasion you want the Solo button to play only one track at a time (so that clicking it releases any other solo buttons), hold down SHIFT when clicking Solo.
  • In "Simple" mode, "Solo" means as it does in common parlance - a track made solo is the only one that can be heard. If a track is solo, the mute buttons are set down on all the other tracks, so that solo is just a shortcut way of muting all tracks except one. If on any occasion you want the Solo button to select multiple tracks for listening, hold down SHIFT when clicking Solo.
  • "None" mode has no solo buttons, so you select the tracks you want to play by unmuting them (clicking the mute buttons so that they are up).