For new users to Audacity, see the the Tutorials for some basics on digital audio, setting up Audacity, playback, recording, and some basic editing.

Audacity is currently in version 0.98. While it is very usable and has many useful features, it is still in beta and is not quite finished yet. Please email your bug reports to audacity-help@lists.sourceforge.net and check the website frequently for new versions. Version 1.0 may be available in the spring of 2002. Audacity is a collaborative project, so if you would like to get involved in any way, check the website for opportunities!

What can you do with Audacity?

Audacity is a program that manipulates digital audio waveforms. In addition to recording sounds directly from within the program, it imports many sound file formats, including WAV, AIFF, AU, IRCAM, MP3, and Ogg Vorbis. It supports all common editing operations such as Cut, Copy, and Paste, plus it will mix tracks and apply plug-in effects to any part of a sound. It also has a built-in amplitude envelope editor, a customizable spectrogram mode and a frequency analysis window for audio analysis applications.

What can't Audacity do?

Although Audacity is a very powerful audio editor that works with an unlimited number tracks of virtually unlimited size, it cannot do everything:

• Audacity cannot record more than two channels at once. It does not support any special hardware, but just works with the system's default audio device.
• Audacity opens MIDI files, but it is not a MIDI editor, and its MIDI features are extremely limited.
• Audacity cannot resample audio to different sample rates (yet).
• Audacity currently only works with 16-bit quality audio (so far - support for higher quality audio is planned).