Audacity 3.7.8 for Mac

Audacity for Mac records audio, edits it and exports it, and it has been most people's first audio editor for over twenty years.

It is free and open source, with no paid tier, no trial period and no feature saved for an upgrade.

It runs natively on Apple Silicon and on Intel Macs, so nothing goes through Rosetta and nothing feels second-hand.

What You Get on a Mac

Record from a microphone, a USB interface or an audio interface, on as many tracks at once as your hardware supports. Cut, copy, paste and delete with unlimited undo. Line several tracks up and mix them down to one file.

The effects list runs from amplify and fade to noise reduction, compression, limiting, equalisation, reverb, and pitch and tempo changes that work independently of each other. Most of them can be auditioned while playback runs, so you hear the change before you commit to it.

It is a plain two-pane editor rather than a studio, which is exactly why it stays approachable. Select a piece of audio, pick something from the Effect menu, listen back.

Recording on a Mac

Audacity talks to Core Audio directly, so USB microphones, interfaces and the built-in inputs are detected without extra drivers, and monitoring latency stays low. Multiple inputs can be recorded to separate tracks at once, which is what you want for an interview with a microphone each.

There is one macOS limitation worth knowing before you start, because it catches almost everybody: you cannot record what your Mac is playing by choosing a device in Audacity. macOS gives no application access to system playback, so capturing audio from a browser or a video call needs a virtual audio driver installed first, and then that driver is what you select as the input.

Recording straight to a network drive or a USB thumb drive is the other thing to avoid - Muse Group's own advice is that Audacity needs fast, uninterrupted disk access, and slow storage shows up as dropouts rather than as an error message.

MP3 Export Does Not Need LAME

The patents that forced the encoder to ship separately expired, and LAME has been bundled inside Audacity ever since. Choose File, then Export Audio, pick MP3, set a quality and save.

The standalone Lame for Mac build is still worth having if you encode from the Terminal or script conversions outside an editor. For everyone else it is a download with nothing left to fix.

Formats, and the FFmpeg Add-on

Out of the box Audacity reads and writes WAV, AIFF, MP3, MP2, Ogg Vorbis, Opus, FLAC, WavPack and AU, which covers nearly everything a recording or a music file arrives as.

What it will not open on its own is the licensed and container-heavy end: M4A and AAC, WMA, AC3, and the audio inside video files. Those need the optional FFmpeg library, which is a separate .pkg on the download page for licensing reasons rather than technical ones.

Installing it is a matter of running the package and then pointing Audacity at it under Settings, Libraries - our How to Install FFmpeg for Audacity guide covers the dialog. If you would rather not convert inside an editor at all, ffWorks is the friendlier Mac front end for the same engine.

Effects and Audio Unit Plug-ins

Audacity loads Audio Unit plug-ins, the same format Logic and GarageBand use, alongside VST3, LV2 and Nyquist. So an AU compressor or reverb you already own will usually appear in the Effect menu after a rescan.

The limit is instruments rather than effects. Audacity has no MIDI sequencing, so AU synths and sampled instruments have nothing to play them - it processes audio you have already recorded.

The analysis side is quietly excellent: an envelope tool for drawing volume changes by hand, a spectrogram view with adjustable scale, a Plot Spectrum window for reading frequency content, and label tracks for marking up a long recording before you cut it.

Which File To Download

The download page carries five files. Only one of them is the program most people want.

Windows users want the Audacity for Windows page instead, and the rest of our Mac downloads sit alongside this one.

Audacity 4.0 Beta for macOS

The 4.0 beta is a real rebuild rather than a new coat of paint. The interface has moved off wxWidgets onto Qt, clip handling and time stretching have been reworked, and every track gets its own meter.

It opens 3.x projects with clips, tracks and labels intact, so trying it costs little beyond disk space. But it is a beta, and several things have not made the crossing yet - LADSPA plug-ins, Vamp analysers and tempo tracks among them.

Take 4.0 to see where Audacity is going, and 3.7.8 if you have work to finish this week.

What You Need To Run It

Muse Group tests Audacity 3.7.8 on macOS 14 and 15, and it may still run on any release from macOS 10.11 El Capitan onward. There is no stated processor or graphics requirement.

The one hard rule is the installer, not the machine: macOS 10.14 and earlier cannot use the universal .dmg and need the Intel-only build instead. On anything newer, the universal file picks the right code for your processor by itself.

Beyond that, give it a real disk. Internal storage or a decent external SSD is fine; network volumes and thumb drives are the usual cause of dropouts during long recordings.

Where It Fits With Your Other Mac Tools

Audacity edits audio it has been given, so most Mac workflows put something in front of it. VLC for Mac will play and export the audio out of almost any video file, and MKVToolNix for Mac pulls a specific track out of an MKV without re-encoding anything.

For streaming and screen recording, OBS Studio for Mac handles the capture while Audacity cleans up a separately recorded backup track afterwards.

Video editors who would rather do the audio in the same place will be happier in Shotcut for Mac or Final Cut Pro, both of which keep the whole edit in one window.

For checking what you exported, IINA and mpv player for Mac both open instantly and use almost nothing while they do it.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

Audacity is free, so this is about fit rather than money. The tell is in the left column.

Quick questions

Download Audacity 3.7.8 for Mac and see how it handles your recordings, or tell us how you got on - this page has no reviews yet, so yours would be the first.