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 Project

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 one of the Export commands 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 Project 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 one of the Export commands instead. For more information on the project file format, see the file formats page.

Export As WAV...

Exports the current Audacity project as a standard audio file format such as WAV or AIFF. You can change the format of exported files in the Preferences dialog.

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 or part of a track, use Export Selection.

Export Selection As WAV...

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 As MP3...

Exports the current Audacity project as an MP3 file. Audacity does not encode MP3 files directly, but instead requires that you download a separate MP3 encoder. See Exporting MP3 Files for details.

To export only a single track or part of track, use Export Selection as MP3.

Export Selection As WAV...

This is the same as Export MP3, 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. See Exporting MP3 Files.

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. This menu item does not ask you if you want to save changes, so be careful not to select it by accident. (When we release version 1.0, it will ask you if you want to save changes.)