Menu Reference

From Audacity Development Manual
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Many commands in Audacity appear in one of the menus and are documented on the linked pages.


Clickable Images

Bulb icon Clickable Images
  • You can click on the names of the menus in this manual to explore the menus further.
    • This is indicated by the green box with the arrow in it and text "Click on the image to learn more".
  • If you hover over the names of the menus, you will get a tooltip with some more information, even if you don't click.

The Menu Bar

Image of the Menu bar as it appears on Windows


The File Menu provides commands for creating, opening and saving Audacity projects, importing and exporting audio files and performing batch operations using ChainsThe Edit Menu provides standard edit commands (Undo, Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste and Delete) plus many other commands specific to editing audio or labelsSelect Menu has commands that enable you make selections of tracks or parts of the tracks in your project.View Menu has commands that determine the amount of detail you see in all the tracks in the project window. It also lets you show or hide Toolbars and some additional windows such as Undo HistoryTransport Menu commands let you play or stop, loop play, scrub play or record (including timed and sound activated recordings)Tracks Menu provides commands for creating and removing tracks, applying operations to selected tracks such as mixing, resampling or converting from stereo to mono, and lets you add or edit labelsGenerate Menu lets you create audio containing tones, noise or silenceAudacity includes many built-in effects and also lets you use a wide range of plug-in effectsThe Analyze Menu contains tools for finding out about the characteristics of your audio, or labeling key featureThe Tools Menu provides access to commands such as for screenshots and macrosThe Extra Menu provides access to additional commands that are not available in the default Audacity menusThe Help Menu lets you find out more about the Audacity application and how to use it, it also includes some diagnostic toolsMenuBar.png


Click for details
Click on the image to learn more

The menu bar is at the top of the Audacity window. The menu bar is slightly different on Mac, it has an 'Audacity' and 'Window' menu, due to the conventions on that operating system.

The Extra Menu

Bulb icon The Extra Menu

The Audacity menu bar shown above shows an additional optional menu: Extra.

  • The Extra menu can be turned on at View > Extra Menus (on/off) or the Interface pane of Preferences.
  • The Extra menu adds access to many less frequently used commands. These are particularly useful to visually-impaired or motion-impaired users, but others may find them useful too.
  • If you require regular access to just a small set of these extra commands you can set shortcuts for them and leave the extra menu hidden.

The Menus

Menu What you'll find there
Audacity (Mac Only) About Audacity, Preferences, System Services, Show and Hide Audacity and other applications, and Quit.
File Working with Audacity project files and other audio files.
Edit Altering the audio in your project.
Select Making selections of tracks, or within tracks, in your project.
View Change Zoom levels. Show clipping, Undo History, Mixer Board, Toolbars and Karaoke window.
Transport Control recording and playback.
Tracks Adding, aligning and labeling audio tracks.
Generate Creating new audio in your project. Audio generating plug-ins will also appear here.
Effect Processing the audio in your project. External Effects plug-ins will also appear in this menu.
Analyze Analyzing the audio in your project. External plug-ins that act on audio but do not produce audio output will appear here, as well as tools like Silence Finder and spectrograms.
Window (Mac Only) Minimize and zoom windows, choose the project window to bring to the front.
Tools Additional menus for Macros and other plug ins.
Extra The Extra menu provides access to Toolbar operations and to extra commands for track focus and movement of the editing or playback cursor that are not available in the default Audacity menus. These will be of most interest to visually-impaired users or those who have difficulty using the mouse.

Shortcuts can be assigned to these commands if required.

Help Short and full Help; capture Audacity screenshots; download current Audacity; audio device information; show the Log and generate support data; Audacity version number, license and build information.