# Simplifying Audacity

### From Audacity Manual

This page is primarily intended for teachers (and anyone working with others) who want to create an easier version of Audacity with fewer menu items.

These are advanced instructions that let you use freely available language tools to make a customized language file for Audacity that shows fewer menu items.

The customized language file can be in English or any other supported language.

## Instructions

Eventually we hope to provide a customized language file with reduced menus ourself. Meantime, you can follow the below instructions to create your own file. If you need help following these instructions, please ask on the Audacity Forum.

1. Get hold of Poedit.
2. Get hold of the translations file for your language and version of Audacity.
   - For English language, download http://audacity.sourceforge.net/locale/audacity.pot.
   - For languages other than English, download the appropriate Audacity .po file from Google Code. You can check the two digit code that corresponds to your language here.
3. Load the .po or .pot file into Poedit.
4. Add a "!" (exclamation mark) to left of the translation of each menu item you want to hide. The .pot file will not have translations, so it's possible to just add a "!" in the empty translation box.
   View > Simplified View:
   - You can provide a View > Simplified View checkbox menu item to turn your simplified language on or off. To do this, ADD "Simplified View" (without the "!") in the empty translation box in the .pot file, or REMOVE the "!" from the translation of "!Simplified View" in the .po file.
   - If you provide View > Simplified View and use the .pot file you should translate the items you want to remove and place "!" in front of them. Otherwise when you uncheck Simplified View there will be empty menu items.
5. Click File > Save as... to save the file as "Audacity.mo". Poedit may warn you that some strings are not translated, but that is not a problem. You can still use the .mo file.
6. Open your Audacity installation folder then open the "Languages" folder inside that.
   - For English language, create a folder called "en-simple" inside the "Languages" folder and paste your saved "Audacity.mo" inside that.
   - For languages other than English, open the folder for your language (for example, "fr" for French) and paste in the "Audacity.mo" file you saved so that it replaces the previous "Audacity.mo".
7. Restart Audacity and select your modified non-English language in Interface Preferences (if it is not already displaying). To display the simplified English language, choose "Simplified".

| Not all menu and other items can be hidden yet. For example, the Mute/Solo buttons, shipped Nyquist and LADSPA plug-ins and Preferences items cannot be hidden.

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