Audacity 2.2.0 alpha April 30th - skins

Thanks! I like the options for more skins, particularly the dark.

But why hide a number of options in extra submenus? Its a lot easier to look
down one open menu.

I can see that the options to export as: mp3, wav, ogg etc would oveload the main menu, but it makes greater sense to retain “Export Audio” “Export Selected Audio” & “Multiple” on the main “File” menu.

I’ll certainly use the dark skin, I think the colours are excellent (similar to ocenaudio), but I’ll change over to keyboard shortcuts for the newly hidden options I use.

Thanks for testing. Don’t forget that 2.2.0-alpha is not a stable release. Be sure to export your work regularly as WAV.

The developer doing most of the commits at the moment insists on short root menus. There are several items in a submenu that I have argued in vain should be in the root of the menu.

Over-aggressive shortening/grouping leads to a few weird-looking decisions, such as Pause being in both Play and Record.

I agree, but few others on Team do. I think there will be more complaints than we expect, as well as plaudits from others (it is hard to please everyone).


Gale

Well, well, I just checked, I didn’t realise when I posted above that the Classic skin had been butchered as well.

Big mistake, big step backwards.

Two options for each skin maybe?
Classic Root and Butchered Root. :wink:

I tried out DarkAudaciy last year and the truncated menus were a deterrent.

Maybe you could persuade the team to take a look at the crowded menus in Reaper, FLstudio etc and then then reappraise the situation.

Audacity’s classic root menus are clarity and simplicity incarnate.

Please pass this post on.

Further to the above I just got a big fright.

The setting for the solo button in 2.2.0 is for “simple”, and it changed the setting I
had in my 2.1.2 Audacity (I didn’t see a need to switch to 2.1.3). I didn’t know this and when I opened a complex multi-track project in 2.1.2 I wondered what was going on when only one track would solo and others were muted.

I’ve not had this before when trying out various Audacity versions. solo has always been for multiple tracks, I’ve never changed the solo setting in years

Any other surprises I should watch out for in 2.2.0?

The menu design is not part of the Theme, but goes with all of the Themes.

I think ultimately there may be some way to customise the menus. I don’t expect to lever any more persuasion until 2.2.0 is released and we assess the wider reaction.

I don’t know I would go that far. Some of those menus are long, so involve greater mouse traversal than we have now.

But on Windows you can also use the keyboard to access menu items, using ALT then the underlined character. What we seem to have forgotten with the current aggressive grouping is that you often now need an extra key press, one key press to open the submenu then another to access the item.


Gale

That change was made in 2.1.3. Typically we don’t force a preference change or behaviour change on the user, but sometimes we do if we think the new default is the best for most users.

You can view Missing features - Audacity Support to see the changes that 2.1.3 brought in, though it does not mention the Solo button behaviour change, which was arguably an omission.


Gale

The other change that you should notice in the 2.2.0 alphas is that we have changed the default recording mode such that pressing the Record button or using shortcut R wil now record on the same track and using Shift+Record or Shift+R will record on a new track. Preciously this was the other way around.

Fortunately if you prefer “the od ways” in this respect we have just very recently added a preference which switches that behavior round the other way, so that Record records on a new track and Shift modified record records on the same track (append record).

In the latest alpha you should find this setting in the new Tracks Behaviors preferences pane (though note that we are still discussing where it should go - Gale and I are both of the opinion that it should reside in Recording Preferences - so it may well move in later alphas).

WC

Thanks for the ALT tip Gale

Btw is there a keyboard shorcut to open the Effects menu, Alt +E opens the Edit
Menu. I already have many effects assigned to keys but I can’t cover them all.

I made this point when real time effects were introduced and the presets were tucked away in a submenu of a menu instead of one click to open the visible
dropdown menu at the top and one click to open the preset. Plus many effects that had their own dropdown built into their interface, no longer did when opened in Audacity. Other Daws with real time effects don’t suffer from this.

The solo button change initially had me worried because I often save a project with several SFX tracks solo’d and many others with similar SFX - potential rejects - muted (35 tracks on this project). Now I couldn’t see which was which and thought the project had corrupted until I closed it without saving and found the same thing when opening another project. I’d never ever used the simple solo option so didn’t realise until I looked it up what the cause was.

Thanks WC, glad there will still be provision for the seasoned option I always use. :wink:

Alt + C

The full list of factory set shortcuts (release version) is here: Commands and Keyboard Shortcut Reference - Audacity Manual

Shortcuts for the development (alpha) version are subject to change: http://alphamanual.audacityteam.org/man/Keyboard_Shortcut_Reference

After pressing ALT, for whichever menu you want, look for the underlined letter at the top of the menu.

I recorded your complaint, but no-one else I know of has complained. This is what it looked like in 2.0.6:
ambience_in_2.0.6.png
I guess the argument is that when we added user presets, we could not have those at the top of the effect as well, and we did not want to have user presets for some effects that otherwise have no presets (like Nyquist) but not for those that already have factory presets and import/export.

I think an answer could be to allow any type of preset to have a shortcut bound to it, and possibly (for GUI effects) add those shortcuts as a row of buttons at the top of the effect.


Gale

Yes, and I think that Keyboard Shortcut Reference page is going to be replaced with http://alphamanual.audacityteam.org/man/Commands. So I would look at that Commands page for using 2.2.0-alpha.


Gale

Thanks Gale, Steve, got it now with the underlinings, I was looking in the menu themselves for them. I must have tried every key with ALT except C :smiley:

Some vsts have 50+ presets.

Maybe I use Audacity effects in a different way to the majority?
I work on a lot of experimental stuff and click back and forth between presets in multiple vsts a until something takes my fancy, then tweak it from there.

I think over time most users would find favourite presets that they are more likely to choose. If we had the suggested feature you could add presets for those.


Gale