Аудачити: бесплатный редактор и рекордер аудио с открытым исходным кодом

Open source digital audio editor and recording application

Audacity is a free and open source digital audio editor and recording application software, available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and other Unix like operating systems. As of December 6, 2022, Audacity is the most popular download at FossHub, with over 114.2 million downloads since March 2015. It was previously served by Google Code and SourceForge, where it was downloaded over 200 million times. It is now part of Muse Group. It is licensed under GPL 2.0 or later. Executables with VST3 support are licensed GPL 3 only to maintain license compatibility. On May 28, 2000, Audacity was released as Audacity 0.8 to the public. Mazzoni eventually left CMU to pursue software development and in particular development of Audacity, with Dannenberg remaining at CMU and continuing development of Nyquist, a scripting language which Audacity uses for some effects. Most of its changes were eventually incorporated into the mainline version and the fork ended. In April 2021, it was announced that Muse Group (owners of MuseScore and Ultimate Guitar) would acquire the Audacity trademark and continue to develop the application, which remains free and open source.

In addition to recording audio from multiple sources, Audacity can be used for post processing of all types of audio, including effects such as normalization, trimming, and fading in and out. It has been used to record and mix entire albums, such as by Tune Yards. It is currently used in the Sound Creation unit of the UK OCR National Level 2 ICT course.

Audacity can record multiple tracks at once, provided the sound card supports it. In addition to a normal mode, recordings can be scheduled ("Timer Record"), or used in a Punch in and roll fashion.

Historically, Audacity is a destructive editor, meaning all changes are directly applied to the waveform. This comes with certain benefits but means that any change made cannot be tweaked later on without undoing all changes in between. For a long time, non destructive editing was exclusive to volume envelopes and playback rates, but since version 3, this has been extended to clip trimming and effects.

Audacity natively imports and exports WAV, AIFF, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and all file formats supported by libsndfile library. Due to patent licensing concerns, the FFmpeg library necessary to import and export proprietary formats such as M4A (AAC) and WMA is not bundled with Audacity but has to be downloaded separately. In conjunction with batch processing features, Audacity can be used to convert files from one format to another, or to digitize records, tapes or MiniDiscs.

Audacity supports LADSPA, LV2, VST, VST3, Audio Units, Vamp and Nyquist plugins, which allows it to load most audio effect plugins. It additionally features a console for Nyquist, a Lisp dialect, in which users can script their own plugins and support for external python scripting. Audacity is somewhat customizable and supports arbitrary arrangements of its toolbars, custom themes and enabling and disabling of several features. In January 2024, Intel introduced some AI powered capabilities for Audacity as part of its OpenVINO plugin suite.

Audacity has several features to allow for spectrum analysis using the Fourier transform algorithm and spectrograms. As with effects, additional analysis plugins can be added, such as ones that check audio books for ACX compatibility.

While Audacity has some features found in digital audio workstations, it should not be considered as such yet. In its current form, it is an audio editor and recorder. In particular, MIDI editing, piano rolls, virtual instruments, parameter automation and channel routings are not yet implemented. Due to the use of wxWidgets, which do not have full iOS or Android support, Audacity cannot run on mobile platforms.

Audacity can make precise adjustments to speed (tempo) while maintaining pitch, to synchronize audio with video or for precise running time. It also has a large array of digital effects and plug ins, including: noise reduction based on sampling the noise to be minimized, vocal reduction and isolation for creation of karaoke tracks and isolated vocal tracks, pitch adjustment maintaining speed, and speed adjustment maintaining pitch. Audacity also has support for multi channel modes with sampling rates up to 96 kHz with 32 bits per sample. It can also detect dropout errors while recording with an overburdened CPU.

In addition to English, Audacity is available in Afrikaans, Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Corsican, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Marathi, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese and Welsh. The documentation, the Audacity Manual, is available only in English. The Audacity Forum offers technical support in English.

The diagram illustrates Audacity's layers and modules. Note the three important classes within wxWidgets, each of which has a reflection in Audacity. Higher level abstractions result from related lower level ones. For example, the BlockFile system is a reflection of and is built on wxWidgets' wxFiles. Lower down in the diagram is a narrow strip for platform specific implementation layers. Both wxWidgets and PortAudio are OS abstraction layers, containing conditional code that chooses different implementations depending on the target platform.