Unzipping the Manual

The Audacity Manual is included with the current release of the software if you obtain the Windows .exe or Mac OS X .dmg installers.

The following instructions are for users who obtained a zip download of Audacity or are on Linux and who want a Manual relating to the current release.

1. Download the zipped Manual for example to your Desktop or Downloads folder.
2. Extract the zip file to a folder called "help" with the "manual" folder inside that. Some extraction tools will do this by default, especially on Linux. On Windows, many tools will extract by default to an "audacity-manual" folder that has the "help" folder inside. If that happens, you must open the extracted "audacity-manual" folder and use that "help" folder inside.
   • Tips for Windows: To produce the correct "help" folder, use 7-Zip then right-click over the zipped Manual and choose "Extract Here", or in any extraction utility, choose a root folder to extract to (for example, C:\ or D:\).
3. Place the "help" folder in the correct location.
   • On Windows or Mac OS X, it should go inside the folder containing the Audacity program. In an Audacity installation, this would usually be under "Program Files" on Windows, or under "Applications" on Mac OS X.
   • On Linux, the "help" folder should usually go in /usr/share/audacity if Audacity was installed from a repository package, or /usr/local/share/audacity if you compiled Audacity from our source code.
     • Note: Root permission will normally be required to modify the /usr directory. Try running a sudo unzip command from a terminal ( for example, sudo unzip ~/Desktop/audacity-manual-2.0.3.zip -d /usr/share/audacity/help/ ). Alternatively, launch your favorite file manager with root privileges ( for example, sudo nautilus ), unzip by right-clicking the downloaded file then close the terminal and file manager.