Selected part of track, cannot cut, copy, trim, etc.

[xgravity23]

I am having a really weird problem, but I'm new to Audacity, so it could just be that. Let me try to describe what happens.

When I select part of track (using the mouse to click and drag), I lose most editing options in the Edit menu. All options are grayed out except those that are available when you have NO tracks open at all, when you start Audacity fresh. The only way around this that I have found is to save after each successful edit, and restart. Sometimes Audacity lets me edit for a longer period of time, and sometimes not at all. Very frustrating.

Can anyone help? Do I need to provide more detail?

Thanks in advance.

[kozikowski]

Let's take the obvious ones first. If you start a fresh Audacity, does it act OK if you try to edit this 6 second sound clip?

http://www.kozco.com/tech/piano2.wav

Koz

[xgravity23]

Yes, it seems to work just fine with that clip.

BTW: All clips I'm trying to edit were created with Audacity.

[xgravity23]

Okay, the problem happens if I have just opened a file and after I...

*adjust the decibels
*silence a selection
*delete a selection

[steve]

Could you give the exact "clicks" and button presses for those steps. (There are several different ways of doing each of those actions).

[xgravity23]

To adjust the gain, I
* open the file
* push the play button
* slide the gain slider on the left side of the track

To silence a selection, I
* open the file
* scroll to the selection using the scroll bar on the bottom of the Audacity window
* use the mouse to select part of the track,
* click the silence button on the toolbar (looks kind of like this, if you use your imagination: w|-|w )

To delete a selection, I
* follow the same first three steps from "To silence a selection" above, then
* click Edit > Delete in the menu

Thanks in advance for you help!

[steve]

You know, I've been using Audacity all this time and I never noticed that you could silence a section with the w|-|w thing

Well I've tried all those things and I can't reproduce the problem, but I think I'm using a much more recent version of Audacity. I'm using Audacity 1.3.9
Try upgrading to 1.3.9 and see if that fixes the problem. (the 1.2 version is really old now and can have some very strange problems on modern machines).

[waxcylinder]

You know, I've been using Audacity all this time and I never noticed that you could silence a section with the w|-|w thing

Hey, me too - and neither did I. And the -|w|- looks like it could be useful too


Though actually both of them are doable much quicker with k/b shortcuts:

Trim: -|w|- is CTRL+T

Silence: w|-|w is CTRL+L

WC