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Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and other operating systems.

We're very pleased that both our GSoC 2009 students did a great job and successfully completed their projects. In addition to their submissions at the GSoC repository, you can access the entire Audacity code repository per instructions at our Developers page.

Audacity is widely used:

• Around 18 million downloads in the past year, and a total of more than 58 million, from SourceForge. Consistently in the top 10 downloads on SourceForge, which hosts more than 100,000 projects.
• Unknown additional numbers of users from mirror sites such as Download.com and bundlers.

 Audacity won Best software for Sound Editing in InfoWorld's BOSSIE (Best of Open Source Software) Awards for 2008 and was one of PC World's Best 100 Products of 2008. Other awards are listed at http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Audacity_Awards.

Audacity has been featured widely in the media, including CNN.com, and a reference in a New York Times article.

Audacity is a flagship application of the wxWidgets cross-platform toolkit and it is widely admired as one of the only multimedia applications that runs beautifully on all three major platforms. Care has been taken to make Audacity work with screen readers for visually impaired users. Audacity has been translated into almost 30 languages, and nearly half of Audacity users use it in a language other than English.

Perhaps most importantly, Audacity has a well established developer community. There are no full-time developers, but about a dozen team members who have been with the project for several years act as the leaders of the community, setting the direction and coordinating releases. Dozens of developers have contributed many features, bug fixes, and other patches. Hundreds of others participate on the mailing lists, and help test and track down bugs. In addition, dozens of volunteers help with documentation, technical support, language translation, community support, and more.

The Audacity developer team has been one of the most welcoming open-source projects, and in fact we attribute much of our success to that attitude. Some of our best contributions have come from young developers with very little prior experience. Even though the quality of their code might not be up to our standards at first, we've found that it's better to accept patches and let the code improve over time, each time gaining us a new developer who will grow and mature, rather than trying to keep it an exclusive club.