Everything we know about 'audacity'

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In computing, Audacity is a digital audio editor application. Audacity is cross-platform, using the wxWidgets software library to provide 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, but may upgrade to GPLv3 after version 1.4.0.

Features

Some of Audacity's features include:

  • Importing and exporting WAV, AIFF, MP3 (via the LAME MP3 Encoder, downloaded separately), Ogg Vorbis, and other file formats
  • Version 1.3.2 also supports FLAC, the open-source lossless audio codec.
  • Recording and playing sounds
  • Editing via Cut, Copy, Paste (with unlimited Undo)
  • Multi-track mixing
  • Digital effects and effect plug-ins. Additional effects can be written with Nyquist
  • Amplitude envelope editing
  • Noise removal
  • Support for multichannel 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 synchronise it with video, run for the right length of time, etc.
  • Large array of plug-ins available
  • Multi-platform: works in Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, amongst others.

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.

audacity Definition

au·dac·ity (ô das′ə tē)

noun

  1. bold courage; daring
  2. shameless or brazen boldness; insolence
  3. an audacious act or remark

Etymology: ME audacite < L audacia: see audacious

audacity

noun:   aggressive boldness or unmitigated effrontery (Example: "He had the audacity to question my decision")
noun:   fearless daring