Audacity Guide: Menu Bar

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 Zoomlevels. Show clipping, Undo History, Mixer, 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 Toolbaroperations 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.