Index of Effects, Generators and Analyzers - Audacity Manual

Index of Effects, Generators and Analyzers

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This page is a quick index to the Effects, Generators and Analyzers shipped with Audacity. You may also add

new plug-ins in various popular formats.

An Effect changes the audio in some way.

A Generator creates new audio, either in an existing track or in a new track.

An Analyze tool performs analysis on a selection of audio - it does not change the audio and does not

create new audio.

Although by default, no keyboard shortcuts are provided for most Effect, Generate or Analyze commands, it

is possible to set up your own shortcut for any of these commands. For instructions on how to do this please

see Keyboard Preferences.

When playing, recording or paused, the Effect menu will appear grayed out, because

changes to the audio data cannot be made until you press the yellow Stop button .

Alphabetical Index of Effects, Generators and Analyzers

Adjustable Fade Compressor High Pass Filter Pluck Sound Finder

Amplify Contrast Invert Regular Interval

Labels

Studio Fade Out

Auto Duck Cross Fade In Leveler Repair Tone

Bass and Treble Cross Fade Out Low Pass Filter Repeat Tremolo

Beat Finder Delay Noise Reverb Truncate Silence

Change Pitch DTMF Tones Noise Removal Reverse Vocal Remover

Change Speed Echo Normalize Risset Drum Vocoder

Change Tempo Equalization Notch Filter Sample Data

Export

Wahwah

Chirp Fade In Nyquist Prompt SC4

Click Removal Fade Out Paulstretch Silence

Click Track Find Clipping Phaser Silence Finder

Clip Fix Hard Limiter Plot Spectrum Sliding Time

Scale / Pitch Shift

Where an effect, generator or analyzer has settings, its description page (accessed by the links below)

shows an image of the interface and its default settings.

Index of Effects, Generators and Analyzers - Audacity Manual file:///C:/Program Files (x86)/Audacity/help/manual/man/index_of_effec...

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Effects by Function

Make the sound louder or quieter

Amplify: This effect increases or decreases the volume of the audio you have selected.

Auto Duck: Reduces (ducks) the volume of one or more tracks whenever the volume of a

specified "control" track reaches a particular level. Typically used to make a music track softer

whenever speech in a commentary track is heard.

Compressor: Compresses the dynamic range by two alternative methods. The default "RMS"

method makes the louder parts softer, but leaves the quieter audio alone. The alternative "peaks"

method makes the entire audio louder, but amplifies the louder parts less than the quieter parts.

Make-up gain can be applied to either method, making the result as loud as possible without

clipping, but not changing the dynamic range further.

Hard Limiter: An extreme Compressor effect. It can sometimes be used to remove stubborn

clicks.

Leveler: This effect makes quiet passages louder and loud passages quieter. It does this in a way

that is different from the Compressor effect. As a result it does add some distortion to the

processed audio. The only way to be sure if the effect does what you want is to try it. For

example, applying this effect twice at its Heaviest setting on a normally-recorded voice can

produce an "air traffic controller" effect.

Normalize: Use the Normalize effect to set the maximum amplitude of a track, equalize the

amplitudes of the left and right channels of a stereo track and optionally remove any DC offset

from the track.

SC4: This effect is a stereo compressor with a variable envelope follower for RMS / peak

behavior.

Fade a section in or fade it out

Cross Fade In: Despite the name this effect does not do an automatic cross fade between two

tracks or clips. This fade applies a curve that will result in equal volume throughout the fade

once the faded in and faded out regions are mixed.

Cross Fade Out: This fade applies a curve that will result in equal volume throughout the fade

once the faded in and faded out regions are mixed.

Fade In: Applies a linear fade-in to the selected audio - the rapidity of the fade-in depends

entirely on the length of the selection it is applied to. For a more customizable logarithmic fade,

use the Envelope Tool on the Tools Toolbar.

Fade Out: Applies a linear fade-out to the selected audio - the rapidity of the fade-out depends

entirely on the length of the selection it is applied to. For a more customizable logarithmic fade,

use the Envelope Tool on the Tools Toolbar.

Studio Fade Out: Applies a more musical fade out to the selected audio, giving a more pleasing

sounding result.

Adjustable Fade: enables you to control the shape of the fade (non-linear fading) to be applied

by adjusting various parameters; allows partial (that is not from or to zero) fades up or down.

For a discussion of what the different types of fade do, see Fades

Change the quality of the sound


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Bass and Treble...: Increases or decreases the lower frequencies and higher frequencies of your

audio independently; behaves just like the bass and treble controls on a stereo system.

Equalization: Adjusts the volume levels of particular frequencies.

High Pass Filter...: Passes frequencies above its cutoff frequency and attenuates frequencies

below its cutoff frequency.

Low Pass Filter...: Passes frequencies below its cutoff frequency and attenuates frequencies

above its cutoff frequency.

Paulstretch: Use Paulstretch only for an extreme time-stretch or "stasis" effect, This may be

useful for synthesizer pad sounds, identifying performance glitches or just creating interesting

aural textures. Use Change Tempo or Sliding Time Scale rather than Paulstretch for tasks like

slowing down a song to a "practice" tempo.

Phaser: The name "Phaser" comes from "Phase Shifter", because it works by combining phase-

shifted signals with the original signal. The movement of the phase-shifted signals is controlled

using a Low Frequency Oscillator (LFO).

Tremolo: Modulates the volume of the selection at the depth and rate selected in the dialog. The

same as the tremolo effect familiar to guitar and keyboard players.

Vocoder: Synthesizes audio (usually a voice) in the left channel of a stereo track with a carrier

wave (typically white noise) in the right channel to produce a modified version of the left

channel. Vocoding a normal voice with white noise will produce a robot-like voice for special

effects.

Wahwah: Rapid tone quality variations, like that guitar sound so popular in the 1970's.

Repair damaged audio

Click Removal: Click Removal is designed to remove individual clicks on audio tracks and is

especially suited to declicking recordings made from vinyl records, without damaging the rest of

the audio.

Clip Fix: Clip Fix attempts to reconstruct clipped regions by interpolating the lost signal.

Noise Removal: This effect is ideal for removing constant background noise such as fans, tape

noise, or hums. It will not work very well for removing talking or music in the background.

More details here.

Notch Filter: Greatly attenuate ("notch out") a narrow frequency band. This is a good way to

remove mains hum or a whistle confined to a specific frequency with minimal damage to the

remainder of the audio.

Repair: Fix one particular short click, pop or other glitch no more than 128 samples long.

Make the sound faster, slower, lower pitched or higher pitched

Change Pitch: Change the pitch of a track without changing its tempo.

Change Speed: Change the speed of a track, also changing its pitch.

Change Tempo: Change the tempo of a selection without changing its pitch.

Sliding Time Scale / Pitch Shift: This effect allows you to make a continuous change to the

tempo and/or pitch of a selection by choosing initial and/or final change values.

Paulstretch: Use Paulstretch only for an extreme time-stretch or "stasis" effect, This may be

useful for synthesizer pad sounds, identifying performance glitches or just creating interesting

aural textures. Use Change Tempo or Sliding Time Scale rather than Paulstretch for tasks like

slowing down a song to a "practice" tempo.


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Truncate Silence: Automatically try to find and eliminate audible silences. Don't use with faded

audio.

Add reverberation or echo

Delay: A configurable delay effect with variable delay time and pitch shifting of the delays.

Echo: Repeats the selected audio again and again, normally softer each time and normally not

blended into the original sound until some time after it starts. The delay time between each

repeat is fixed, with no pause in between each repeat. For a more configurable echo effect with a

variable delay time and pitch-changed echoes, see Delay.

Reverb: A configurable stereo reverberation effect with built-in and user-added presets. It can be

used to add ambience (an impression of the space in which a sound occurs) to a mono sound.

Also use it to increase reverberation in stereo audio that sounds too "dry" or "close".

For details of the underlying principles of delay and reverb effects please see this page in the Wiki.

Remove vocals

Invert: This effect flips the audio samples upside-down. This normally does not affect the sound

of the audio at all. It is occasionally useful for vocal removal.

Vocal Remover: Attempts to remove center-panned vocals from a stereo track. Help text is

available from within the dialog.

Manipulate Audio

Repeat... repeats the selection the specified number of times.

Reverse reverses the selected audio; after the effect the end of the audio will be heard first and

the beginning last.

Invoke Nyquist

Nyquist Prompt... brings up a dialog where you can enter Nyquist commands. Nyquist is a

programming language for generating, processing and analyzing audio. For more information see

Nyquist Plug-ins Reference.

Generators by Function

Generate Tones

Chirp: Generates four different types of tone waveform like the Tone Generator, but additionally

allows setting of the starting and ending amplitude and frequency.

DTMF Tones: Generates dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) tones like those produced by the

keypad on telephones.

Tone: Generates one of four different tone waveforms: Sine, Square, Sawtooth or Square (no

alias), and a frequency between 1 Hz and half the current project rate.


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Generate Silence or Noise

Noise: Generates 'white', 'pink' or 'brown' noise.

Silence: Creates audio of zero amplitude, the only configurable setting being duration.

Generate Instruments or Metronome

Click Track: Generates a track with regularly spaced sounds at a specified tempo and number of

beats per measure (bar).

Pluck: A synthesized pluck tone with abrupt or gradual fade-out, and selectable pitch

corresponding to a MIDI note.

Risset Drum: Produces a realistic drum sound.

Analyzers by Function

Analyze Amplitude or Other Audio Properties

Contrast: Analyzes a single mono or stereo speech track to determine the average rms difference

in volume (contrast) between foreground speech and background music, audience noise or

similar. The purpose is to determine if the speech will be intelligible to the hard of hearing.

Find Clipping: This displays runs of clipped samples in a Label Track, as a screen-reader

accessible alternative to View > Show Clipping. A run must include at least one clipped sample,

but may include unclipped samples too.

Plot Spectrum: This takes the selected audio (which is a set of sound pressure values at points in

time) and converts it to a graph of frequencies against amplitudes.

Sample Data Export: This reads the values of successive samples from the selected audio and

prints this data to a plain text, CSV or HTML file. Further information may be added as a

"header" at the top of the file.

Divide Up Sounds or Silences using Labels

Regular Interval Labels: Places labels in a long track so as to divide it into smaller, equally

sized segments.

Silence Finder: Divides a track up by placing point labels inside areas of silence.

Sound Finder: Divides a track up by placing region labels for areas of sound that are separated

by silence.

Mark Beats using Labels

Beat Finder: Attempts to place labels at beats which are much louder than the surrounding

audio. It's a fairly rough and ready tool, and won't necessarily work well on a typical modern pop

music track with compressed dynamic range. If you don't get enough beats detected, try

reducing the "Threshold Percentage" setting.

Views


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Offline version created on 2013-10-15 - Check current version of this page (development Manual)


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Index of Effects, Generators and Analyzers - Audacity Manual