Simplifying Audacity
- Peter 30Jan19: I have made this page effectively an orphan - particularly from the main page where it is commented out.
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Simplified menus no longer work in Audacity 2.1.2. or later. |
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These are advanced instructions that let you use freely available language tools to make a customized language file for Audacity that shows fewer menu items.
The customized language file can be in English or any other supported language. |
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Currently we do not provide a ready-made "simplified" language file in English or any other languages.
If you are prepared to work with freely available language tools you can still create a simplified language file yourself using the advanced steps. |
The Problem
Audacity has many features, but this can make it intimidating for new users. We've had many requests for a simplified version of Audacity that is easier to use. One problem is that different people have different ideas of what is "simple".
A second problem is that many settings are most useful when getting Audacity set up - settings for recording and playback, to get the MP3 library installed, settings for latency, quality and directories. These settings need to be available during setting Audacity up. They are probably best hidden from users who want to use an already set up version of Audacity.
The Solution
Audacity already contains a flexible system for changing the text in Audacity. This is used for translating Audacity into different languages. When you select a different language in the Interface Preferences Audacity will use text from the file you specify in place of the text that it has built-in. The language files end with the suffix ".mo".
- We have added a small addition to this feature. If the translation of an item in a menu starts with an "!", Audacity will leave that menu item out when using that language. This allows us to radically cut down the menu.
We've created a "simplified" language file which reduces the menus in a way which we think is helpful.
We suggest:
- You set up Audacity normally and confirm that recording, playback and MP3 exporting work fine. The default sample rate is 44,100 Hz. You may want to set a lower rate if audio quality is not that important.
- You can hide the Mixer Toolbar now, using the View Menu.
- Select the Multi-Tool as the tool mode to be used.
- You can now hide the Tools Toolbar.
- If you want to hide the Play-at-Speed Toolbar and the Selection Toolbar you can do so too.
- Now go into the Interface Preferences.
- If you do not want the solo buttons, set the "Solo button" mode to "None".
- Then in the "Language" choice just above, select "Simplified" as the language.
- When you exit the Preferences dialog, you should find that menus have been reduced and now contain fewer items.
If you look in the View Menu you will see that there is a new item called "Simplified View" and that it has a check mark beside it.
Many of the items in the menus will now have gone. One of these is the "Preferences" menu item, and its shortcut (by default Ctrl + P or {{key|Cmd + ,) will no longer work. If you need to access Preferences you can enable the full mode of Audacity again by unchecking "Simplified View" in View Menu. This restores the full menus, letting you make your changes. Click "Simplified View" again to remove access to Preferences.
In simplified mode the option to show or hide toolbars is removed from the menus, which is why we suggest you choose which toolbars to show before enabling the Simplified interface.
Oops. That's a bug and I'll look into it. It should be that the language changes take immediate effect (when you exit preferences). I must have overlooked something.
Advanced
- If you want to customize what menu items are made available and what items are not, it is quite a lot more complex. If you ask on the Audacity Forum, there may be someone willing to create a custom "simplified" language file for you.
- If you want to create a new simplified language file yourself, it's best to get in touch with the Audacity developer list (audacity-devel _AT_ lists_DOT_sourceforge_DOT_net) or click here. This is a new feature, and customizing it is not yet as easy as we would like it to be. People who have used the tools for translating Audacity will be familiar with the steps as described at https://web.audacityteam.org/community/translation. Here are steps using the cross-platform Poedit language file editor, but the principles are the same if you use some other tool. -->
Instructions
- Obtain Poedit.
- Obtain the current version of Audacity from http://audacityteam.org/download/.
- Obtain the translations file for your language from https://github.com/audacity/audacity/tree/master/locale.
- For English language, right-click over "audacity.pot" and save the link or target to your computer.
- For languages other than English, right-click over the ".po" file for your language and save the link or target to your computer. You can check the two digit code that corresponds to your language here.
- Load the .po or .pot file into Poedit.
- Add a "!" (exclamation mark) to left of the translation of each menu item you want to hide. The .pot file will not have translations, so just add a "!" in the empty translation box. View > Simplified View:
- You can provide a View > Simplified View checkbox menu item to turn your simplified language on or off. To do this, ADD "Simplified View" (without the "!") in the empty translation box in the .pot file, or REMOVE the "!" from the translation of "!Simplified View" in the .po file.
- If you provide View > Simplified View and use the .pot file you should translate the items you want to remove and place "!" in front of them. Otherwise when you uncheck Simplified View there will be empty menu items.
- Click , type "Audacity" (without quotes) in the file name box and save. Poedit may warn you that some strings are not translated, or that some settings have not been specified, but that is not a problem. Poedit will save "Audacity.po" and "Audacity.mo" (or "audacity.po" and "audacity.mo" with lower case "a" on Mac and Linux). All you need is the "Audacity.mo" or "audacity.mo" file.
- Open the location to install your new "Audacity.mo" file.
- On Windows, open the "Languages" directory inside the Audacity installation directory.
- On Mac, right-click or control-click over Audacity.app > Show Package Contents then open the "Contents" directory then the "Resources" directory.
- On GNU/Linux, open the "locale" directory in usr/share/ (for Audacity packaged builds) or in usr/local/share (if you built Audacity yourself).
- In the directory opened in Step 7 above
- For English language, on Windows and Mac, create a folder called "en-simple" (without quotes) and paste your saved "Audacity.mo" or "audacity.mo" file inside that. On Linux, create a folder "en-simple", create a folder "LC_MESSAGES" inside that, then paste your "audacity.mo" file inside the "LC_MESSAGES" folder.
- For languages other than English, open the directory for your language (for example, "fr" for French) and paste in the "Audacity.mo" file you saved so that it replaces the previous "Audacity.mo".
- Restart Audacity and select your modified non-English language in Interface Preferences (if it is not already displaying). To display the simplified English language, choose "Simplified".
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Not all menu and other items can be hidden yet. For example, the Mute/Solo buttons, shipped Nyquist and LADSPA plug-ins and Preferences items cannot be hidden. |
