audacity(1) | General Commands Manual | audacity(1) |
NAME¶
audacity - Graphical cross-platform audio editorSYNOPSIS¶
audacity -helpDESCRIPTION¶
Audacity is a graphical audio editor. This man page does not describe all of the features of Audacity or how to use it; for this, see the html documentation that came with the program, which should be accessible from the Help menu. This man page describes the Unix-specific features, including special files and environment variables. Audacity currently uses libsndfile to open many uncompressed audio formats such as WAV, AIFF, and AU, and it can also be linked to libmad, libvorbis, and libflac, to provide support for opening MP2/3, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC files, respectively. LAME, libvorbis, libflac and libtwolame provide facilities to export files to all these formats as well. Audacity is primarily an interactive, graphical editor, not a batch-processing tool. Whilst there is a basic batch processing tool it is experimental and incomplete. If you need to batch-process audio or do simple edits from the command line, using sox or ecasound driven by a bash script will be much more powerful than audacity.OPTIONS¶
- -help
- display a brief list of command line options
- -version
- display the audacity version number
- -test
- run self diagnostics tests (only present in development builds)
- -blocksize nnn
- set the audacity block size for writing files to disk to nnn bytes
FILES¶
~/.audacity-data/audacity.cfgPer user configuration file.
/var/tmp/audacity-<user>/
Default location of Audacity's temp directory, where
<user> is your username. If this location is not suitable (not enough
space in /var/tmp, for example), you should change the temp directory in the
Preferences and restart Audacity. Audacity is a disk-based editor, so the temp
directory is very important: it should always be on a fast (local) disk with
lots of free space.
Note that older versions of Audacity put the temp directory inside of the user's
home directory. This is undesirable on many systems, and using some directory
in /tmp is recommended.
On many modern Linux systems all files in /tmp/ will be deleted each time the
system boots up, which makes recovering a recording that was going on when the
system crashed much harder. This is why the default is to use a directory in
/var/tmp/ which will not normally be deleted by the system. Open the
Preferences to check.
SEARCH PATH¶
When looking for plug-ins, help files, localization files, or other configuration files, Audacity searches the following locations, in this order: AUDACITY_PATHAny directories in the AUDACITY_PATH environment
variable will be searched before anywhere else.
.
The current working directory when Audacity is
started.
~/.audacity-data/Plug-Ins
<prefix>/share/audacity
The system-wide Audacity directory, where <prefix>
is usually /usr or /usr/local, depending on where the program was
installed.
<prefix>/share/doc/audacity
The system-wide Audacity documentation directory, where
<prefix> is usually /usr or /usr/local, depending on where the program
was installed.
For localization files in particular (i.e. translations of Audacity into other
languages), Audacity also searches <prefix>/share/locale