Effect Menu

Peter 29Apr15: ToDo-2P Placeholder to remind us that if the list of effects changes we also need to update the image on the Edit Chains page.

Audacity includes many built-in effects and also lets you use a wide range of plug-in effects. You can download many free plug-ins for Audacity from our website. Plug-ins always appear underneath the divider in the Effect menu. Released builds of Audacity include sample Nyquist and/or LADSPA effects.

To apply an effect, select part or all of the track(s) you want to modify, and select the effect from the menu. Titles which end in an ellipsis (...) will bring up a dialog asking you for more parameters.

All effects that have a dialog let you hear the audio as modified by the effect before you apply the effect to the waveform.

• Built-in effects, Nyquist plug-ins included in Audacity and other Nyquist plug-ins have a Preview button - press this to listen if the current effect settings produce what you want, and if not, change the settings then Preview again. Press OK to apply the effect to the waveform.
• All other effect types supported in Audacity (LADSPA, LV2, VST and Audio Units for Mac) support real-time preview - you can change the effect settings while listening then press Apply to apply the effect to the waveform.

Gale 19Apr17: I don't know the exact intention here, but I changed the image link from Media:EffectMenu.png to Media: Effect-AudacityMenu.png. EffectMenu.png *is* long, doesn't relate to the image map at all, and only appears for me as a thumbnail in Firefox.

• Gale you were looking at an old version. You needed to do SHIFT-F5 to force a refresh.
  • Gale: I looked at the latest copy in "List of Images" with dates, which I thought avoided the need for refresh. Apparently not. CTRL + SHIFT + R did not update the image on this page in any case. Varnish again I suppose?
• Then you'd then have got the short version. I assumed though you prefer the fuller version on this page, so updated the image map.
• Peter 19Apr17: I strongly think that all we need here is the short left hand bit of the image - there is no need to string this out with the Audacity built-in effects listed. That would save a lot more "page length" - plus we already have this image on Effect Menu: Audacity so to have it here too is unnecessarily repetitious.
• Gale 19Apr17: I agree - I looked for an image without the fly out but could not find it. Changed back to EffectMenu.png. Sorry for any extra pasting in James did.

Click, or hover, on any menu item in the image to read about that command.  Skip the image

To save page length, the above menu is shown with the Preferences option to sort menu items by type.

When playing, recording or paused, effects in the Effect menu that do not support real-time preview will appear grayed out. Press the yellow Stop button to access these types of effect.

Contents

• Add / Remove Plug-ins...
• Audacity Built-in effects

• Nyquist effect plug-ins
• LADSPA effect plug-ins
• LV2 effect plug-ins
• VST effect plug-ins
• Audio Units plug-ins (Mac only)

Add / Remove Plug-ins...

Selecting this option from the Effect Menu (or the Generate Menu or Analyze Menu) takes you to a dialog which enables you to load and unload Effects (and Generators and Analyzers) from Audacity. This enables you to customize your Effect Menu making it shorter or longer as required. For details see Add / Remove Effects, Generators and Analyzers.

By default all the Built-in effects, with the exception of Classic Filters, are loaded in Audacity.

Additional plug-ins can also be loaded into Audacity. For details see the following FAQs:

• Installing Effect, Generator and Analyzer plug-ins on Windows
• Installing Effect, Generator and Analyzer plug-ins on Mac
• Installing Effect, Generator and Analyzer plug-ins on Linux

See also this list of available Nyquist effect plug-ins on the Audacity Wiki, that you can easily download and add to Audacity.

Repeat Last Effect  Ctrl+R

For quick access to an effect, you can use CTRL + R to repeat the last used effect at the same settings, and you can use Keyboard Preferences to set up keyboard shortcuts for effects that you use often.

Audacity Built-in effects 

Find out more about the 'Audacity' submenu for built-in effects here.

Nyquist effects 

Find out more about the 'Nyquist' submenu for plug-in effects here.

LADSPA effects 

Find out more about the 'LADSPA' submenu for plug-in effects here.

The following efect clases: LV2, VST and Audio Units (Mac only), are always third-party plug-ins added by the user (and also by the operating system, macOS, in case of Audio Units).

LV2 effects

LV2 is a more advanced evolution of the LADSPA plug-in architecture. Note that LV2 effects in Audacity cannot yet display a full graphical interface.

VST effects

Virtual Studio Technology (VST) is a software interface that integrates software audio synthesizer and effect plug-ins with audio editors and recording systems, such as Audacity.

Audio Units effects (Mac only)

Audio Units (AU) are a system-level plug-in architecture provided on Mac computers.

As the title states, these Audio Units effects are only available for Apple Mac computers.