Audio Track Dropdown Menu

I'd be willing to make an exception here and have an image of the menu, if only to emphasize where this menu is.
This page does not follow the standard menu format of an h2 for each menu item. - Bill

Name...

Displays the "Track Name" dialog where you can give the track a new name. Useful in multi-track projects to keep track of what's on each track.

Moving Tracks

Tracks can be moved up and down using the menu items.

• Move Track Up: Moves track up.
• Move Track Down: Moves track down.

It is usually more convenient to just click in the panel on the left of the track and drag the track up or down

Waveform

This first half of this waveform is a "Chirp" tone which stays at the same amplitude (loudness), as shown by the horizontal top and bottom. The linear scale on the left goes from +1 at the top (the maximum possible loudness without distortion when the signal is positive) to -1 at the bottom (the maximum when it is negative). The horizontal line centered on 0.0 is silence. What you can't see without zooming much further in is that the pitch of this tone is gradually increasing. Zooming would show the individual cycles in the waveform (the positive and negative peaks) occurring much closer together at the end of the sound. The second half of the waveform is the word "Audacity" spoken by a male voice.

This image is a waveform view of an extremely short chirp, one tenth of a second, with only a few cycles, where the pitch increases very rapidly. As it's so short, we can zoom in to show the closer spacing of the cycles as the frequency (and hence the pitch) increases from left to right.

Waveform (dB)

This is the same chirp and word as in the first Waveform image, but in this view the vertical scale is in dB. This is a logarithmic method of displaying the amplitude. It gives a better representation of the sound we hear, because this scaling gives better detail for the fainter sounds. It also shows more clearly than the waveform view how the energy of the "Audacity" word is naturally concentrated in the central "dac" part, and weakest at the end.

Spectrum

This view of the same chirp and word shows how the amount of energy in different frequency bands changes over time. Higher frequencies are at the top of the scale, lower frequencies at the bottom. The blue color is the least energy and the red and white are the most. The progressive increase of pitch in the chirp tone is vividly demonstrated by the upward sloping diagonal line. Spectrum view also confirms that the "Audacity" word has most energy in the middle of the word.

You can view a sound in Audacity in another way than over time. Here is the "Audacity" word again as a spectrum plot, showing the relative energy (dB) of each frequency in the entire word. Had the voice been female, the plot would have shown its higher frequencies.

There are several options for adjusting exactly how the spectrum is displayed.

Possibly add a link to part of some tutorial page describing how to track down clicks (using the spectrum view) and remove them. Maybe not in time for 1.4.0.

Pitch

Highlights the contour of the fundamental frequency (musical pitch) of the audio, using the Enhanced Autocorrelation (EAC) algorithm.

• Here is the spoken word "Audacity" in Pitch view:

• Here is a chirp from 200 Hz to 8 kHz in Pitch view:

When using Pitch view, go to Spectrogram Preferences and make sure that "Frequency Gain" is set to 0. Any other setting will make the Pitch view useless. [why?] Also note that "Frequency Gain" is the only setting in the Spectrogram Preferences that has any effect on the Pitch view.

ToDo The above image needs explanatory text. The below image should probably be incorporated or even used instead as it shows different colors (these need explaining).

Splitting and Joining Channels

• Mono, Left Channel and Right Channel Mainly used on multiple single channel files (ones that are not the split left and right channels of a stereo pair) so as to mix to a final stereo track. "Mono" feeds the output of that track to both left and right speakers on most two channel systems; "Left Channel" and "Right Channel" feed it only to that respective speaker. Currently Audacity does not support multi-channel playback.
• Make Stereo Track Use this command on the upper of two adjacent, single channel tracks which you want to join into one stereo track. The upper track will become the left channel of the new stereo pair, and the lower the right channel. The tracks do not need to be selected with the mouse or keyboard before this process, and either can be mono, left or right before joining to stereo.
• Split Stereo Track splits the two channels of a stereo pair into separately editable left and right channels, left above the right. If you are mixing multiple single channel files, you might want to use the "Mono" command noted above then use the pan slider on the Track Panel. This will give you more control over the pan than leaving the tracks as left and right channel.

Set Sample Format

Change the sample format of the track to 16-bit integer PCM, 24-bit integer PCM or 32-bit floating point. The numbers representing each sample in the waveform will be recalculated.

Set Rate

Change the sample rate of the track. This does not resample the track, so changing the sample rate will change the speed at which the track plays back. Useful if you imported a track that had no sample rate tag or was tagged with the wrong rate and was thus playing back at the wrong speed.

If you want to change the sample rate of a track without changing the speed use the Resample command in the Tracks Menu.