Menu Reference - Audacity Manual

# Menu Reference

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

- The full set of Audacity commands are also listed in the Keyboard Shortcut Reference.
- Shortcuts can be added and changed in Keyboard Preferences - which can be faster than using the menus.
- Most of the most used menu commands are available from the Toolbars

## Clickable Images

| 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 do not click.

## The Menu Bar

Image of the Menu bar as it appears on Windows

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

| 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 will 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 plugins will also appear here.
Effect | Processing the audio in your project. External Effects plugins will also appear in this menu.
Analyze | Analyzing the audio in your project. External plugins that act on audio but do not produce audio output will appear here, as well as tools like Label Sounds 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.