Timed Recording

Audacity Recording Scheduler - Timer Record
The current Audacity (2.0.0 onwards) has its own recording scheduler which can start and stop recordings automatically, provided Audacity is already running. This feature is known as Timer Record and it is accessible from or you can use the keyboard shortcut Shift+T, see  this page in the Audacity manual.

Audacity 1.2.x

 * 1) Go to the and turn on "Play other tracks while recording new one".
 * 2) Click.
 * 3) Zoom out ( or ) to the length you will be recording.
 * 4) In the new track, click the point where you want to start the recording and drag the point to right with your mouse to select the amount of time you want to record.
 * 5) Start recording. Audacity will start recording in a second new track and stop recording automatically when it reaches the end of the selected area in the track above.

Audaremote for Windows
If you are on Windows, there is a free standalone program called which can schedule Audacity to start and stop recording (launching Audacity if necessary), then optionally save a project file and quit Audacity unattended.

Other solutions
There are some other ways you could schedule recordings in Audacity 1.2.6 on any operating system. If you have a standalone macro or script builder program on your computer you can set a script that launches Audacity then types and  (the Audacity hotkeys for start and stop recording) at preset times.

Or if you are recording an internet stream, know the web address of the stream and it is not protected, you can record with a command line recorder like. To do this you would write a batch file containing a command to the player and set a task scheduler program such as to execute the batch file at a pre-arranged time. The command would specify the web address and file name to copy the stream to. An example command would be

mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile prog.mp3 http://uryfs1ac.uk/live.mp3 This will dump the live stream to the file prog.mp3 until interrupted. You would end the task by using the scheduler program's option to end the task if it is still running after a specified length of time.