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: Doubles the current zoom level.
• Zoom Normal: Reverts back to Audacity's default zoom, where you can see 5 - 10 seconds at a time.
• Zoom Out: Cuts the current zoom level in half.
• Fit In Window: Zooms out just enough so that you can see the entire project.
• Fit Vertically: This doesn't actually zoom, it resizes all of your tracks so that they fit in the window vertically.
• Zoom to Selection: If you have audio selected, this zooms and scrolls so that the selection just fits in the window.

Zoom Tool

You can get very precise control over zooming using the Zoom Tool, which you can choose from the Tools Toolbar.

To zoom in, position the mouse cursor over a track and click. To zoom out, you can shift-click or press your right mouse button. The zooming is centered on the position of the mouse cursor, so if you click on the left side of a waveform, the audio will be centered at that point after zooming.

You can zoom in on a specific region by clicking and dragging. Position the mouse at the left edge of the region you are interested, then click and hold the mouse button, then drag the mouse to the right.

When you release the mouse button, Audacity will zoom in to that region:

Zooming Using the Edit Toolbar

The four buttons on the right of the Edit Toolbar give you additional shortcuts you can use for zooming:

Zoom In: Doubles the current zoom level.

Zoom Out: Cuts the current zoom level in half.

Zoom to Selection: If you have audio selected, this zooms and scrolls so that the selection just fits in the window.

Fit In Window: Zooms out just enough so that you can see the entire project.

Zooming Using the Scroll Wheel

If your mouse has a scroll wheel, you can use it to zoom. Position the mouse cursor over the audio tracks, hold don the Control key on your keyboard, and scroll up to zoom in, or scroll down to zoom out.

Mac users: Hold down both Command (⌘) and Control while using the scroll wheel.

Vertical zooming

Vertical zooming is not nearly as useful as horizontal zooming, but occasionally you will find it useful. You don't need to choose a tool, just move the mouse over the vertical ruler of a track, and it becomes a magnifying glass, indicating that you can zoom.

Click once to zoom in, and shift-click or right-click to zoom out. Alternatively, click once and hold down the mouse button, then drag to select a vertical region:

When you release the mouse button, exactly the range you outlined will be shown vertically.

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

When zooming out, sometimes it takes two clicks to get back to the normal vertical zoom level, where the vertical ruler goes from -1.0 to 1.0.