Interface Preferences

From Audacity Manual

Display

• Ergonomic order of audio I/O buttons: Sets the Transport 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.
• Show 'How to get Help' message at program start up: Uncheck this to disable the default start up dialogue that lists our help resources.
• Meter/Waveform dB range: Sets the minimum displayed value of:
  • Meter Toolbar
  • The vertical logarithmic scale in the Waveform (dB) view mode (this can be chosen in the Track Drop-Down Menu or set in the Tracks Preferences)
  • The level slider for Sound Activated Recording in Recording Preferences

The meter and the waveform can be dragged out to display more gradation ticks and values within your chosen range.

• Language: Changes the language of the menus and other on-screen text. Languages with non-Latin character sets require you to have the correct fonts installed on your system, otherwise the menus will display with ???? characters.
• Location of Manual:
• "Local" displays the locally installed version of the Manual in your default web browser when you access it from Help Menu. The Manual will automatically be installed in the Audacity installation folder if you obtain the Windows .exe or Mac OS X .dmg installers. If the Manual is not installed, accessing it when the "Local" preference is chosen will show a dialogue asking you to view or download it online. Instructions for installing the downloaded Manual are here.
• "From Internet" always displays the latest online version of the Manual in your default web browser, even if you have it installed locally.

Behaviors

• Closing last window quits Audacity: Sets Audacity to quit when the last project window you are working with is closed. Unchecking this lets you use File > Close (or the operating system Close buttons or shortcuts) to close the last window and then create a new empty Project. If this preference is unchecked, you can only quit Audacity by using File > Exit (on a Mac, Audacity > Quit Audacity) or the respective Audacity shortcut.

On Mac, this preference is unchecked by default, to respect standard OS X behaviour, and Audacity will remain accessible by a reduced-size menubar.

• Beep on completion of longer activities: Makes Audacity play a beep when activities lasting longer than a minute are completed. Visually impaired users may find this useful.

Modes

• CleanSpeech Mode: A customization of Audacity by Lynn Allan with limited menu options. It's mainly used for quick clean-up and export to MP3 of one or more speech recordings, carried out as a batch process called a "chain". The available effects in the "CleanSpeech" menus and chain are limited to Fade In, Fade Out, Leveller, Noise Removal, Normalize and Truncate Silence, plus Stereo to Mono (located in the Edit menu). A simple "MP3 Conversion" chain is also provided which has only a Normalize effect. A wider range of chained effects is available by using Batch Processing without enabling CleanSpeech.

To run a "CleanSpeech" or "MP3 Conversion" chain with CleanSpeech Mode enabled, click the special CleanSpeech button that is added to the right of the standard Transport Toolbar. 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. Exported files will be saved in a folder named "cleaned" . The "cleaned" folder will be in the location from which files were last opened (if the chain is applied to the project), otherwise in the location from which the original files were imported for processing. The original files are retained unmodified. To edit the parameters for the chains, or to add a new one, click File > Edit Chains...

If you use Effect > Noise Removal... in CleanSpeech mode, the last captured "noise profile" will be saved as a "noisegate.nrp" file inside a "NRP" folder in the Audacity data folder. This saved profile will be used permanently until you capture another profile. Therefore at the start of a new "Audacity CleanSpeech" session, unlike at the start of a standard session, the "OK" button in Noise Removal will already be active, indicating that a noise profile is ready to use.

CleanSpeech mode also allows for export and import of presets. File > Export CleanSpeech Presets... exports the current noise profile and most current settings for Leveller, Normalize and Truncate Silence to a .csp presets file of your choice. Use File > Import CleanSpeech Presets... to import the noise profile and effect settings from any saved .csp file for use in the current CleanSpeech session. Note: Although importing a .csp file loads its noise profile for Noise Removal to use, it does not overwrite any saved noisegate.nrp profile. The noisegate.nrp profile will be remembered again when you launch your next CleanSpeech session.

More information about CleanSpeech is available here.