Timed Recording

If you want to schedule start and stop times of your Audacity recording without using third party programs or scripts, you need current Audacity. However users of legacy Audacity 1.2.x can still schedule the end of a recording, if you can be there to start it.

Related article(s): Recording length All our Recording Tips

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 Transport >Timer Record... or you can use the keyboard shortcut Shift+T, see this page in the Audacity manual.

Audacity 1.2.x

1. Go to the Audio I/O tab of Preferences and turn on "Play other tracks while recording new one".
2. Click Project > New Audio Track.
3. Zoom out (View > Zoom Out or CTRL+3) 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 Audaremote  which can schedule Audacity to start and stop recording (launching Audacity if necessary), then optionally save a project file and quit Audacity unattended.

Note: audacity.exe must be in its default location of C:\Program_Files\Audacity otherwise Audaremote won't work. Audaremote only works with Audacity 1.2.x.

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 R and S (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 mplayer . To do this you would write a batch file containing a command to the player and set a task scheduler program such as Windows scheduled task  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.