Audacity Tour
Welcome to Audacity. The purpose of this tour is to make new users
familiar with Audacity's interface. When Audacity is first loaded,
the main window appears. (It may look slightly different depending on
your operating system:)

The Audacity main window, version 0.95
To get some sound to work with, you can either record a new sound,
or open an existing sound.
- If you have a microphone attached to your computer, try recording
a sound by clicking on the record button, speaking into your
microphone, and then hitting the stop button.
- If you don't have a microphone, you can use Audacity to open an
existing sound file. Select Open from the File menu to select a
sound to open. For more information on the sound formats that
Audacity supports, see the
file formats page.
Once you have recorded or opened a sound, you can begin working with
that sound as a track. In Audacity, each track is like its own little window,
with its own menu, title bar, and close box:
- To get rid of a track, click in its close box. You can get it back
by selecting Undo from the Edit menu. (In Audacity, everything
can be undone, an almost unlimited number of times.)
- To change the way a track is displayed, click its title,
which brings up a pop-up menu. Anything you select in that pop-up
menu applies only to that track, and not any other tracks you might
have in the window.
- To select an entire track, click in its label area, below the
title bar and close box. To deselect a track or add another track
to the selection, hold down shift while clicking in the label.
To make changes to the sound, you will want to use the
Selection Tool.
With this tool selected, click and drag inside the track to select
part of the audio. You can listen to your selection by pressing the
Play Button or pressing the spacebar.
Once some audio is selected, you can make changes to it similar to
the way you would change text in a word processor or graphics in
a painting program. In particular, you can cut, copy, and paste
audio just as you would expect. To apply effects, such as fading in
or out or applying reverb, select the audio you want changed and
select an effect from the Effect menu. Remember, if you don't like
how it sounds, you can always select Undo.