For those who have ever used legacy 1.2 Audacity versions: The above steps to reset preferences will not affect the 1.2 settings, but if you merely delete audacity.cfg and 1.2 settings still exist, some settings in current Audacity will reset to their 1.2 values. This may therefore not resolve any issues you were trying to fix in current Audacity. To get Audacity working, I had to make some changes in sound settings from Control panel. The changes made were not fruitful because when I start recording I hear nothing except a glitched loud noise, these changes did nothing but gave me more problems.

Audacity User Manual

Audacity Default Setting

New features in this release

■ Visit the Forum for technical help ■Using Help Resources■ Search the Wiki for further tips. ■

Guide to the Audacity Project Window

1Menu Bar2Transport Toolbar3Tools Toolbar4Recording Meter Toolbar5Playback Meter Toolbar6Mixer Toolbar
7Edit Toolbar8Play-at-Speed Toolbar9Device Toolbar10Unpinned Play/Recording Head11Timeline12Scrub Ruler
13Track Control Panel14Audio Track15Label Track16Selection Toolbar17Status Bar

Hover over and click on the image to learn more.Skip the image

Help buttons

• Some places in Audacity have a help button, click for the relevant Manual page.

Using Audacity

Quick Help

• Getting Started - Recording, Importing, Editing, Exporting...
  • Audacity Tour Guide - quick tour of selected features of Audacity
  • What is That? - an online website guide to Audacity's User Interface
• Installing and updating Audacity on Windows, Mac or Linux
  • Installing plug-ins for Audacity on Windows, Mac or Linux
  • Changing language
• Connecting audio equipment - Microphones, instruments, USB devices...

• Managing Audacity Projects - Audacity's internal workspace
• Audacity Setup and Configuration
  • Preferences - changing your settings and reset to default
• Toolbars Overview - including how to arrange Toolbars
• Audio Tracks, Waveform view and Spectrogram view
• Playing and Recording
• Importing audio and Exporting audio files - For use in other applications
  • LAME MP3 export and FFmpeg import/export libraries for more formats
• Navigation Tips and Playback Tips

Audacity Settings Windows 10

Editing with Audacity

• Zooming Overview and Vertical Zooming
• Effects, Generators and Analyzers

• Macros - for batch processing and effects automation
• Mixer Board - Analogous to a hardware mixer board
• Accessibility - Audacity for the visually impaired
• Time Tracks - used for varying speed control
• Multi-channel Recording - recording more than two separate channels of audio

Customizing Audacity

• Adding plug-ins & other customization and Creating Nyquist plug-ins
• Themes - learn how to select your preferred Audacity look and feel

Tutorials

• Editing an Audio File - Import the file, edit and export it
• Your First Recording - Record microphone, guitar, keyboard
• Mixing Voice with Background Music - For podcasts
• Recording Multi-track Overdubs - Record over other tracks
• Looping - make an audio loop with Audacity
• Making Ringtones and IVR messages - For your cellphone or IVR system

• Copying tapes, LPs and other media to CD or computer
  • Sample workflow for LP digitization and Sample workflow for tape digitization

• Burning Audio CDs and How to import CDs

• Exporting to iTunes and Importing from iTunes

Reset Audacity To Default Settings

Index, Glossary and More

• Information for Developers - join our developer community

Links: Most links are to other pages in this Manual. Italiciszed links are to pages external to this Manual, mostly to our main website or Wiki. We are not responsible for the content of any other external sites.

Screenshots: Most screenshots in this Manual are of Audacity running under its default settings on the Microsoft Windows 10® operating system.

Copyright: Pages in this Manual are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. In essence, you are free to (1) copy, distribute and transmit the work (2) to adapt the work, under condition you must attribute the work to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). For any reuse or distribution, you may not remove our copyright notice and must make clear to others the license terms of this work.