Audacity keyboard shortcuts for faster podcast editing

Every shortcut below uses the Windows keys. On a Mac, Ctrl becomes Cmd and Alt becomes Option. Single-letter shortcuts like X, C and Z are the same on both.

These are the Audacity defaults. To change one, open Edit > Preferences (Audacity > Preferences on a Mac) and go to the Shortcuts section, called Keyboard in older versions. If a shortcut here does nothing, someone may have changed it on that computer.

Space plays and stops. X plays and stops but leaves the cursor where you stopped, which is the one to use when you hear a stumble and want to cut right there. P pauses. C plays a cut preview: it plays a moment before and after your selection without the selected audio, so you hear the edit before you make it.

Comma and period jump the cursor a short way left and right; Shift plus comma or period jumps further. J moves the cursor to the start of the track and K to the end.

Zooming in and out is where most editing time disappears. Ctrl+1 zooms in, Ctrl+3 zooms out and Ctrl+2 returns to normal. Ctrl+F fits the whole project to the window, and Ctrl+Shift+F fits the tracks to the window height.

The fastest pattern: press Ctrl+F to see the whole episode, drag across the area you want, then press Ctrl+E to zoom straight to that selection. Make the cut, press Ctrl+F again, and move to the next spot. No scrolling, no repeated zoom clicks.

Ctrl+K (or the Delete key) removes the selection and closes the gap. Ctrl+Alt+K deletes but leaves a gap, which keeps a second speaker's track in sync. Ctrl+I splits a clip at the cursor, Ctrl+L replaces the selection with silence (good for a cough on one track), Ctrl+T trims everything outside the selection and Ctrl+D duplicates it. Press Z before cutting to snap the selection edges to zero crossings, which avoids little clicks at the edit. Ctrl+Z undoes and Ctrl+Y redoes. For the basics of selecting and removing audio, see how to cut audio in Audacity.

Ctrl+B adds a label at the selection and Ctrl+M adds one at the playback position while audio is playing (Cmd+period on a Mac). Type a word like 'cut', 'cough' or 'great quote' and keep listening.

Labels also help co-hosts who split the editing. Instead of emailing timestamps back and forth, one person labels on the first listen, exports the labels from the File > Export menu, and the other imports them and makes the cuts.

Pass one: play the whole episode at normal speed and drop a label (Ctrl+M) at every problem without stopping. Pass two: jump from label to label, zoom to the selection with Ctrl+E, preview with C, cut with Ctrl+K, and fit back to width with Ctrl+F. Listening once and cutting once is much faster than stopping to fix each stumble as you hear it.

For the full process, from cleanup to export, see how to edit a podcast. Editing in GarageBand instead? Here are the GarageBand shortcuts worth learning.