Playing and Recording

The easiest way to control Audacity playback and recording is with the Control Toolbar:

Play: If a subset of the time range is selected in the main window, only the selection will be played. If there is no selection, playback will begin wherever the editing cursor is. To start playback from the beginning, choose Skip to Start.

File:Loop.png Loop: Hold down Shift while pressing Play to loop the current selection, playing it over and over again until you press Stop.

Record: Recording begins at the current cursor location or at the beginning of the current selection, but always creates a new track.

Stop: will stop playing or recording immediately.

Pause: will temporarily pause playing or recording without losing your place.

Skip to Start: move the cursor to the beginning of the audio. This is often useful if you want to play everything, or record a new track starting from the beginning.

Skip to End: move the cursor to the end of the audio.

There's sometimes a bit of a delay before recording begins. If you enable Always allow pausing in the Interface tab of the Preferences, you can press Pause before you press Record - then when you unpause, recording will begin immediately.

Keyboard Shortcuts

The following keyboard shortcuts work exactly the same as the buttons in the Control Toolbar:

• Spacebar: Play or Stop
• L: Loop
• Shift-Spacebar: Loop
• R: Record
• P: Pause
• Home: Skip to Start
• End: Skip to End

In addition, the following addition keyboard shortcuts give you additional ways to play or record:

• 1: Play 1 second at the current mouse position.
• B: Play from the current mouse position to the nearest beginning or end of the selection
• C: Play before and then after the current selection, so you can hear what the audio would sound like if the selection was deleted.

All keyboard shortcuts can be edited using the Keyboard tab of the Preferences.

Play Regions

The current region being played is indicated by the following arrows in the ruler - in this example, the play region is from 15 to 45 seconds:

During playback, a green triangle indicates the current playback position - in this example, at about the 25 second mark:

You can play simply by clicking and dragging in the Ruler to create a play region! That's a great way to play without modifying the selection.

Also, if you do modify the selection or the play region after playback has begun, it does not affect the active play region. The audio will stop whenever it would have based on the play region when playback began.