Zooming

This is Audacity's view of an entire song. It's really useful to get an idea of the whole piece from start to finish, but it's hard to see much detail.

Zooming the time scale, or zooming "horizontally", is something you'll do all the time. It lets you focus on the first 15 seconds, for example:

Or the last 15 seconds:

Or even a tiny fraction of a second, where you can see the individual audio samples:

Occasionally you will even want to zoom vertically in order to see individual samples more clearly:

If you get lost, refer to the ruler at the top of the window. It always shows you exactly where you are in time, in hours:minutes:seconds.

Time Scale Zooming (Horizontally)

There are five ways to zoom:

View Menu

You'll find all sorts of useful commands for zooming at the top of the View Menu:

• Zoom In
• Zoom Normal
• Zoom Out
• Fit In Window
• Fit Vertically
• Zoom to Selection

Zoom In and Zoom Out are very straightforward

Zoom Tool

• Zoom tool
• Zoom buttons in the Edit toolbar
• Scroll wheel
• Drag to resize track

To zoom in, click on a point, or click and drag to zoom to a particular selection

Very important is how to zoom out! Either right-click if you have two mouse buttons, or shift-click.

Vertical zooming

Don't need to choose a tool, just move the mouse over the vertical ruler.

You can zoom in quite a bit, and zoom out by a factor 2 also.

Can be tricky to get back to "normal" - but it snaps back to the "normal" range of -1 to 1 when you get close