Tracks

Anthing that is added to your audacity project will be placed inside a track, which sits on the timeline of your project. You can have an unlimitted number of tracks in a project, subject only to the speed and power of your computer to manipulate the data. Each track will have a Track Panel at the left-hand end with the name and information about the track. You can click on the track name to access the Track Pop-Down Menu and alter various parameters of the track.

Audio Tracks

Audio tracks contain digitally sampled sounds. In Audacity, the two channels of a stereo recording are represented by a single stereo tracks, although this can be split into two separate mono tracks from the Track Pop-Down Menu. Each audio track has a sample rate and sample format as described in the Digital Audio foundations page. Different audio tracks can have different sample rates and sample formats. You can import audio of any sample rate or bit depth and Audacity will sample rate convert it to the project rate and bit depth on the fly, as well as upon Export. You can choose different sample rate conversion qualities for playback and exporting in the Quality Preferences.

Note Tracks

Note tracks are only available in the development builds of Audacity. They display data loaded from a MIDI file. They are currently not editable or playable.

Label Tracks

Label tracks can be used to annotate a project and later save these annotations in a text file, as well as defining regions of a project (in time) to be exported or edited. Each label has a name (which can be any text), a start time and and end time. The start and end times can be adjusted by dragging the label's start and end markers, and the reagion between the start and end markers can be selected by clicking on the label. These labeled regions can be exported to separate files (like doing Export Selection, but for every label in the project) using the Export Multiple command on the File Menu.