Audacity is a free digital audio editor application. Audacity is cross-platform, using the wxWidgets software library to give a similar graphical user interface on several different operating systems.

Audacity was created by Dominic Mazzoni of Google, while he was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. Dominic Mazzoni is still the main developer and maintainer of Audacity, with help from many others around the world.

The latest stable release of Audacity is 1.2.6, released on 15 November 2006. As of August 10, 2007, it was the 11th most popular download from SourceForge.net, with over 24 million downloads. Audacity won the SourceForge.net 2007 Community Choice Award for Best Project for Multimedia. Audacity is free software and is licensed under the GNU General Public License version two, but may update to GPLv3 after version 1.4.0.

Features

Some of Audacity's features include:

Importing and exporting WAV, AIFF, MP3 (via the LAME encoder, downloaded separately), Ogg Vorbis, and other file formats

Version 1.3.2 also supports Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC)

Recording and playing sounds

Editing via Cut, Copy, Paste (with unlimited Undo)

Multi-track mixing

A large array of digital effects and plug-ins. Additional effects can be written with Nyquist

Amplitude envelope editing

Noise removal

Support for multi-channel modes with sampling rates up to 100 kHz with 24 bits per sample

The ability to make precise adjustments to the audio's speed, while maintaining pitch, in order to synchronize it with video, run for the right length of time, etc.

Multi-platform: works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix-like systems (including GNU/Linux and BSD) amongst others.

Audacity can also be used for post-processing of all types of audio, including podcasts. It can be used for finishing podcasts by adding effects such as normalization, trimming, and fading in and out.

Language support

In addition to English language help, the ZIP file of the downloadable Audacity software program includes help files for Afrikaans, Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Welsh in its user interface. A partial Bengali help file is also included.

The Audacity website also provides tutorials in languages other than English.