Selecting Audio - the basics

Peter 09May17: Current page title is a "working title" subject to change.

This is a landing page for the Help button in the warning/error message that the user gets if thay try to apply an action that requires a selection with no selection extant. Just the bare minimum here, as users landing here want to get on with applying an effect. They can come back for more, once past that roadblock. Therefore please do not extend this Page.

This page shows just the basics of how to select audio in your project to operate on.

Most Audacity operations involve selecting a range of audio in one or more tracks, then deleting or moving the selection or applying an effect to it which changes its sound.

Typical use of Audacity only requires that you know two ways of selecting audio: selecting the entire project or selecting a region.

For further details and graphical examples please see the Selecting Audio page.

Selecting the entire project

You can select the entire length of all tracks on screen with Select > All or use the shortcut CTRL + A (or CMND + A on a Mac).

See also: Automatic Select All, if none selected

Selecting a region using the mouse

The easiest way to select a region of audio is to click and drag the cursor using the mouse.

If Selection tool is not selected (default setting), choose from Tools Toolbar, below:

Then click the left mouse button anywhere inside of an audio track, and click and drag to the other edge of your selection, and release.

Automatic Select All, if none selected

There is a setting in Tracks Preferences called "Select all then act on entire project, if no audio selected" that enables Audacity to automatically select the entire project if you have made no explicit time selection.

If this preference is unchecked, all menu items and buttons requiring an audio selection will remain grayed out until audio is selected.