Audacity is an amazing, open-source and free-to-use audio editing software that manages to blend powerful tools in an easy user interface that even complete beginners can use without a hiccup. And due to this very reason Audacity is now of the most popular audio editing tools out there.

It’s available on all major operating systems, namely Windows, Mac and Linux. In fact, in a blog post published on 24th October 2020 by FossHub, Audacity’s download partner, the software crossed over 100 million downloads.

Over 20 years since its original release, Audacity still remains free and constantly gets updates for more stability, bug fixes and new features. 

Most of the work is done by volunteers who have been taking the project forward for quite some time now. Users can also help out the development process by making donations or volunteering themselves to help out in tasks like documentation, translations, user support and by even testing out new code. 

So in case you need to get your hands dirty working on some audio, you can be pretty sure Audacity is the software to pick. In this article, we’re going over how you can download and set up Audacity on your system, 

It’s recommended to use only the official download files (linked in the guide below) to download Audacity and avoid any unnecessary malware installation alongside.

Also read: How to record desktop audio using Audacity?

Downloading Audacity

The download process is actually quite straightforward.

Step 1: Head over to the official Audacity website. Hover over the Download tab and pick your operating system of choice.

Step 2: You’ll be taken to a download page where you’ll see all available downloads and plugins for the latest version of Audacity. There are two files here we need to be concerned about. 

• Audacity installer: This is the setup file for Audacity and will install the software on your PC just like any other setup file.
• Audacity zip file: This is a pre-installed version of Audacity compressed in a ZIP archive. It is useful if you keep moving around your installation. 

For the purpose of this article, we’ll go ahead with the setup file. 

Step 3: Clicking on the installer file will take you to FossHub, Audacity’s download partner. Just click on the file you want according to your operating system. 

Step 4: Once the setup file has finished downloading, double-click it to run the setup and proceed as instructed. 

You’ll be asked to agree to the GPL and set the installation directory. On the last step, just click on install and wait for the setup to finish, 

And that’s all. You’ve installed Audacity on your PC.

Also read: How to loop on Audacity?