After installing Audacity and the Lame mp3 support codec, I discovered that my ctrl-S key combination was not being passed to other programs on my computer (a bit of a pain for such a common combination). Such other ctrl combinations as I tried worked fine. Warm and cold reboots made no difference. I initially suspected a hardware problem, but using keyboard monitors I was able to confirm that the key presses were being passed to Windows; using the Win7 on-screen keyboard I was further able to confirm that the combination was not being passed even when created directly in Windows software. As I’d installed Audacity and Lame shortly before spotting the problem, I tried the normal course of uninstalling them again to see what happened. The key combination immediately recovered without so much as a reboot.
Has anyone else hit this, and if so, is there a fix?
If Audacity is the application currently in focus, Ctrl+S is the shortcut for “Save Project”.
If Audacity is not running or does not have focus it should not have any effect on other software as Audacity does not support global hot keys.
The Audacity keyboard shortcuts can be configured in “Edit > Preferences > keyboard”
Audacity certainly didn’t have the focus when I was trying to save a document in Notepad, save a page in Firefox or mute sound (and subsequently reconfigure my key mappings) in World of Warcraft. And unless it started under the covers without my spotting it, to the best of my knowledge it wasn’t even running once I’d performed a cold reboot of the machine, but the problem persisted. I may try a reinstall at some point and remap the save, though, to see whether that makes any difference.
Perhaps it was something completely different and the apparent association with installing Audacity was just a strange coincidence? Out of the millions of Audacity users on Windows 7 I’ve not hear of this problem before
Hi Steve. Well, that would be a “something completely different” that persisted through two reboots, yet went away (immediately, mark you) when I uninstalled Audacity and Lame, then. Well, for what it’s worth, I spent the last two decades testing software professionally for IBM, and it wouldn’t be the first time I’d seen a coincidence of that order - but my gut feel says otherwise and my money is on there being some sort of odd interaction going on there. I’d been struggling with the “save project” and “export” options just before I last stopped using Audacity, so it’s possible I left it in some sort of unusual state that confused matters. I need to find the time to reinstall both and try to reproduce the problem, both to confirm its existence and so that you’ve something to go on if it’s real. Probably won’t be today, though.
OK, cracked it. Yes, my apologies: Audacity is utterly blameless.
All my attempts to reproduce the problem by installing and uninstalling Audacity and Lame failed, but the problem wasn’t present on a safe boot, so I worked my way through the various services and start-up programs via msconfig.exe. The actual culprit was Skype, launching at system startup, where I’d very recently bound ctrl-S to take in-session snapshots (and completely forgotten having done so). Heaven knows why that should take exclusive possession of the hot key from other Windows 7 programs, but it seems it does - if I unbind the key again, the problem goes away. And whilst I don’t remember doing so, I can only assume that I also closed down Skype just before those original uninstalls that seemed to fix the problem.
