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Effects menu in Audacity not working

25th March 2008, 07:36 pm


Question:

I’ve converted my cassettes to MP3 using Audacity (thank you so much for the advice) but there are a lot of things on the program that it won’t let me access. The ‘effects’ on the drop down menu, such as noise reduction, changing speed etc., won’t highlight/open when I click on them. Nothing highlights. It looks like, since it’s free, the ‘effects’ bonus isn’t included? The same goes for the ff and rewind icons, it won’t do either.

Please let me know if there’s something I can do that will enable these things to work.

Answer:

The Effects menu in Audacity isn’t working? In order to enable Audacity’s Effects menu, you need to have already selected what part of the audio you’d like to modify with an Effect. So first, drag your mouse and select a clip from your audio. Then go back to the Effects menu. I think you’ll find you’ll now have options available.

It looks like, since it’s free, the ‘effects’ bonus isn’t included?

Nope, everything is included. Audacity is 100% free – you download the software, and you get full functionality without any cost.

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4 Comments

  1. mark freeman:

    Hmmm. Nope, I get exactly the same problem. I’ve sampled a CD, it’s a wav file, now I’m dragging the mouse to select a part of the audio clip (it goes kind of greyer), but all the entries on the “Effect” menu are still greyed out.

    Lots of other menu items are inactive too – I mean ones you’d expect to be active, like “Cut”, “Copy” and “Paste” under the “Edit” menu – luckily there are toolbar buttons for these (which _are_ working, even though the menu versions aren’t).

    Maybe it’s a bug, but the only time I’ve seen this has been with trial versions of software. I’ll look around and see if there’s a paid-for version of Audacity, as I really need a destructive audio trimmer, and this looks ideal, if I can get it to work.

    Cheers.

    15 October 2009, 4:52 am

  2. mark freeman:

    Aaarghh!

    Just worked out what the problem is.

    Even if you select part of a track, the Effect menu WILL NOT WORK IF THE PAUSE BUTTON IS PRESSED! So you think you’ve stopped the track, but in fact you only paused it…

    This is a bit hard to spot – I’d even read something related to this in the help and didn’t realise this was my problem – maybe a tooltip to help people who click the Effect menu with a track paused?

    Cheers, hope this helps the guy above.

    15 October 2009, 4:56 am

  3. David:

    Mark Freeman,

    You are so cool thx!

    15 March 2010, 4:37 am

  4. Kay:

    Thank you Mark Freeman! Such a simple explanation for something that was bugging me SO much!

    26 July 2010, 1:05 am