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Introduction

About

Audacity is a free and open-source audio editor used for playing, recording, and editing audio. It has multi-track editing capabilities and cross-platform support for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Audacity’s versatile and easy-to-use features make it a great audio editor for beginners who want to record music or voiceovers, apply special audio effects, or create audio projects, such as podcasts, audiobooks, and song compilations.

This guide is intended for beginner Audacity users who want to create an audio project and covers the following introductory topics:

  • Managing a project

  • Playing and recording a project

  • Editing a project

  • Applying common audio effects


Downloads

To get started, download Audacity and other optional add-ons:

  • Audacity – Download and install Audacity.

  • FFmpeg – Download and install the FFmpeg library, which is required to import and export more types of audio file formats, such as .m4a, .aac, and .wma formats.

  • Audacity themes – Download and install additional light or dark themes.


First steps

To get the most out of Audacity and this guide, start with the following topics:


Keyboard shortcuts

To increase your productivity with Audacity, use keyboard shortcuts:


Additional resources

To learn more about Audacity and other audio recording/editing techniques, check out the following links: