Preferences

Audio I/O

• The first control or set of controls in this pane is where you configure which device Audacity should use for sound input and output. For example, some people might have two sound cards, and they want to select which one to use. Some computers have a built-in microphone, and this is also where you'd select whether you want to record from there or from the line-in jack on your sound card. No need to adjust this if Audacity is already playing to and recording from the correct place.

• Record in Stereo: If this is checked, recordings you make in Audacity will be stereo, otherwise they will be monaural. Note that the interpretation of mono recordings depends on your system - on most systems making a mono recording of a stereo input will result in the two channels being mixed, but on other systems it could give you just the left channel, for example.
• Play other tracks while recording new one: Check this box if you want to record multiple tracks over top of one another! Record the first track as usual. Then, with this box checked, click record again. The first track you recorded will play, but Audacity will also record a new track at the same time, maybe allowing you to sing harmony with yourself or add realtime sound effects to a recording.
  You may notice that when you play the two tracks you recorded together, they aren't synchronized. This is normal and is not the fault of Audacity. To fix it, you will need to grab the Time Shift tool and slide one of the tracks around until it sounds right.
  Note that this is not the same as playthrough, which means having the computer play the track that you are currently recording, as you are recording it. You may be able to enable this using your operating system's Mixer, but Audacity cannot enable this directly.

Quality

This panel sets the default sample rate and bit depth for new projects. It does not affect any existing project - to change the sample rate of an existing project, just click on the rate at the bottom of the window and select a new rate from the pop-up menu.

The bit depth affects imported material, if it's copied, as well as newly recorded material. The advantage of the 32-bit float resolution is that effects return material at a this resolution, which improves the final mix, because the computer has more precise material to work with.

File Formats

• When importing uncompressed audio files...
  • Make a copy of the file to edit: selecting this means that Audacity will run a little bit slower, but it will always have its own copy of any audio you are using in a project. You can move, change, or throw away your files immediately after you open or import them into Audacity.
  • Edit the original in place: selecting this operation means that Audacity depends on your original audio files being there, and only stores changes you make to these files. If you move, change, or throw away one of the files you imported into Audacity, your project may become unusable. However, because Audacity doesn't need to make copies of everything, it can import files much more quickly this way.
• Uncompressed Export Format: This lets you select the format that Audacity will use when you export uncompressed files, i.e. anything other than lossy formats, such as OGG and MP3. Audacity can output a huge amount of different formats with the Other option, which lets you define any aspect of the multitude of different formats.
• Ogg Export Setup: Use this control to set the quality of Ogg Vorbis exporting. Ogg Vorbis is a compressed audio format similar to MP3, but free of patents and licensing fees. A normal quality Ogg Vorbis file is encoded with a quality setting of "5". Note that unlike MP3 encoding, Ogg Vorbis does not let you set a bitrate, because some audio clips are easier to compress than others. Increasing the quality will always increase the file size, however.
• MP3 Export Setup: Use these controls to locate your MP3 encoder and set the quality of MP3 encoding. Higher quality files take up more space, so you will need to find the level of quality you feel is the best compromise. For more information, see Exporting MP3 Files.

Spectrograms

You can view any audio track as a Spectrogram instead of a Waveform by selecting one of the Spectral views from the track's pop-up menu. This dialog lets you adjust some of the settings for these spectrograms.

• FFT Size: The size of the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) affects how much vertical (frequency) detail you see. Larger FFT sizes give you more bass resolution and less temporal resolution, and they are slower.
• Grayscale: Select this for gray spectrograms instead of colored ones.
• Maximum Frequency: Set this value anywhere from a couple of hundred hertz to half the sample rate (i.e. 22050 Hz if the sample rate is 44100 Hz). For some applications, such as speech recognition or pitch extraction, very high frequencies are not important (visually), so this allows you to hide these and only focus on the ones you care about.

Directories

Use this panel to set the location of Audacity's temporary directory. Audacity uses this directory whenever you work on a project that you haven't saved as an Audacity Project (AUP file) yet. You have to restart Audacity (close and open it again) for changes to the temporary directory to take effect.

Interface

• Autoscroll while playing
  Pageflips to the right when the cursor travels to the right end of the wave display, either during playback or recording.
• Update Spectrogram while playing
  Tries to keep the spectrogram updated while playing. This requires a lot of CPU power, and realy isn't a good idea unless you're playing a realy small piece. In combination with Autoscroll while playing this can cause pauses during playback.
• Enable Edit Toolbar
  Gives you a toolbar of a few useful functions. Check out the page on the Edit Toolbar for more information.
• Language
  Lets you change the language of the menus and other onscreen text to the language of your choice, if you realy have to change it again after picking your language when Audacity started the first time. Simply enter the right language code, close and restart Audacity. Check the language directory in the installation direcory to see what languages are available to you.

Keyboard

• Commands/Key Combination List
  All commands in Audacity that can be triggered by a keyboard shortcut is listed here. Click on the shortcut and the assigned shortcut is highlighted in the command/shortcut list. Click on the "Clear" button to erase the shortcut assigned to the function selected in the Commands column.
• Adding new shortcuts/changing shortcuts
  Click on the command in the list. Click in to the field next to the "Set" button and press any key or combination of command key(Shift,CTRL,ALT) and alphanumeric key(everything else). The description of that key or key combo will appear in the field or replace the shortcut. By clicking on the "Set" button, you can add or change this key or key combo as a shortcut to the function selected in the Commands list.

Head over to this page for step-by-step description of the dialog and how to edit the command/keyboard combination list with a text editor.