Audacity 4.0.0

Audacity records audio, edits it and exports it, and it has been the first audio editor most people ever open for over twenty years.

It is free and open source, with no paid tier, no trial clock and no feature held back for an upgrade.

It is developed by Muse Group, which took the project over in 2021, and it runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.

What You Can Actually Do With It

Record from a microphone, a USB interface or whatever your computer is playing, on as many tracks at once as your hardware supports. Cut, copy, paste and delete with unlimited undo. Line several tracks up and mix them down to one file.

On top of that sit the effects: noise reduction, normalisation, compression, limiting, equalisation, echo, reverb, pitch and tempo changes that work independently of each other, and a good deal more. Most of them can be auditioned in real time now, so you hear the change before committing to it.

It is not as intimidating as the feature list suggests. Selecting a piece of audio and applying something from the Effect menu is the whole workflow, and the built-in Help covers the rest.

You Do Not Need the LAME Download Any More

The MP3 patents that forced the encoder to ship separately expired, and LAME has been bundled inside Audacity ever since. Choose File, then Export Audio, pick MP3, set a quality, and it saves.

The old LAME MP3 Encoder is still worth having if you build your own encoding pipeline or run a Linux distribution whose Audacity package leaves MP3 support out, which some still do. For everyone else it is a file with nothing left to fix.

The Formats It Opens and Saves

Out of the box Audacity reads and writes WAV, AIFF, MP3, MP2, Ogg Vorbis, Opus, FLAC, WavPack and AU, which covers nearly everything a recording or a music file arrives as.

What it does not handle on its own is the licensed and container-heavy end: M4A and AAC, WMA, AC3 and the audio inside video files. Those need the optional FFmpeg library, which is a separate installer on the download page for licensing reasons rather than technical ones.

Our How to Install FFmpeg for Audacity guide walks through pointing Audacity at it, and the standalone FFmpeg build is worth keeping around for conversions you would rather not do in an editor at all.

Effects, Plug-ins and Analysis

Audacity loads VST3, LV2, Nyquist, LADSPA and Audio Unit plug-ins, so the effects list is only a starting point. Nyquist is the interesting one for anybody who likes tinkering, since effects are short scripts you can write yourself.

The analysis side is genuinely useful and often overlooked. There is an amplitude envelope editor for drawing volume changes by hand, a spectrogram view with adjustable scale and window size, a Plot Spectrum window for reading frequency content, and label tracks for marking up long recordings.

If your problem is only that some tracks are louder than others, MP3Gain fixes that across a folder without re-encoding, and no editing is involved.

Which Build To Download

The download page carries more than the one installer, so here is what each file is for.

The portable .zip is the genuine article rather than a repackage - unzip it anywhere and run it, and it leaves your installed copy alone. Mac users want the Audacity for Mac page instead, and the rest of our Mac downloads are alongside it.

Audacity 4.0 Beta, and Why You Probably Want 3.7.9

The download page also carries an Audacity 4.0 beta. It is a real rebuild rather than a facelift: the interface has moved off wxWidgets onto Qt, clip handling and time stretching have been reworked, and each track gets its own meter.

It opens Audacity 3 projects with clips, tracks and labels intact, so trying it costs little. But it is a beta, and several things have not made the crossing yet - LADSPA plug-ins, Vamp analysers and tempo tracks among them.

So take 4.0 if you want to see where Audacity is going, and 3.7.9 if you have work to finish this week.

What Changed in 3.7.9

This is a patch release, so the list is short and the fixes are the point. The 3.7 series itself was the one that brought master effects applied across a whole project, a rewritten compressor and limiter, and reworked dark and light themes.

• Fixed an exception thrown when pasting into a newly created track.
• Fixed tone generation, the waveform scale setting, the SetClip Name parameter and clip-boundary command names used by scripting and macros.
• Fixed preset loading in the Distortion effect.
• Fixed pasting into an empty audio track not keeping the source sample rate.
• Allowed the AltGr modifier when editing labels and clip names.
• Added options for where silence is truncated - start, middle or end.
• Added Podcast 2.0 chapter export as JSON from label tracks.
• Improved the interface on HiDPI displays under Linux, and fixed Mute and Solo buttons in the Mixer Board.
• Fixed multichannel FLAC import, and fixed envelopes breaking after joining clips.

Full list of changes.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

Audacity is free, so this is about fit rather than money. The tell is in the left column.

Nero WaveEditor and WavePad are the other free editors worth a look.

There are plenty more in the audio editors category, including splitters and joiners such as Helium Audio Splitter for chopping a long recording into tracks.

Quick questions

Download Audacity 4.0.0 and see how it handles your recordings, or tell us how you got on if you have used it before.