New User - Time Shifting Problem

Hey! Brand new Audacity user here. Having an issue time shifting. I have shifted a few parts of different audio files just fine, but I am having trouble shifting the very beginning of the top file shown below. It just will not let me shift it for some reason. The bottom file can shift fine. Not sure what the issue it, I did a quick search of this forum and basically just found out that the time shift tool can be finicky at times. Any help much appreciated!
Audacity_Screenshot.PNG

Are you trying to shift it to the left? It looks like there may be a “split line” at the left end of the track, indicating that there is some more audio before time=0.0
Can you move it to the right?
I assume that you are selecting the Time Shift tool? (in the picture, the Time Shift Tool is not selected).

This is the beginning of my file. The top is recorded commentary, the bottom file is music. I want to shift the top file to the right so that the music plays before the recording in the top file begins.

And yes, I am def selecting the Time Shift tool. Just did not have it clicked for this pic.

How do you get rid of the time before t=0? I did not put anything there intentionally, but I was pressing a LOT of buttons in the beginning trying to figure out the program so I could have easily done it accidentally.

Go to the end of the track and check that there’s no audio blocking the clip that you are trying to move. I’ve been confused by this before when there was a tiny fragment of audio left over from an edit - it was so small that I couldn’t see it until I zoomed in. Perhaps it’s something like that.

This is a bit tricky.
If you click on the the track’s info panel (left end of the track), the entire track will be selected. If you then look at the “selection highlight” in the Timeline (above the tracks), you will be able to see if the selection extends to the left of zero.
Dragging with the Time Shift tool from within a selected region, will drag all audio clips that are included in the selected region.

Looks like there was no audio before t=0, but I did click the left side of the track to select all, and then tried the timeshift tool again and it somehow worked! Thank you very much!

Having another timeshifting issue here. The program will not let me timeshift the bottom track (starting just after 14:15) to the right. It will let me shift it to the left however. I have a couple of other audio clips I would like to add at this point in the recording, and I figured I would just timeshift to the right, paste them in, and then fix up the connections after. Is this not possible? Is there a better way to go back and add some audio to the middle of a recording? Thanks for any help!
Audacity_2.PNG

If, when you drag the audio clip, it suddenly stops as if it has hit an unmovable object, then it probably has. Scroll to the right to see what it is hitting. If it is hitting a very small audio clip, you may need to zoom in to see it.

How can I tell? This is likely the case, as I stopped and started the recording quite a few times at the end, so there are a lot of small audio clips there (which I want to keep), but they all seem to be blended into 1 big clip (i.e. I can see any divider lines anywhere.)

Usually it’s not a problem because usually you can see all the clips, but for tricky cases, here’s a bit of code that can be run in the Nyquist Prompt effect that will create labels for each audio clip in the selected track:

Just ckick and drag to select a bit of the track that you want to test, then open the Nyquist prompt effect, and copy and paste this code into the text box and run it.

(defun makelabel (times)
  (let ((offset (get '*selection* 'start))
        (track-name (get '*track* 'name))
        (start (first times))
        (end (second times)))
    (list (- start offset) (- end offset) track-name)))

(if (arrayp *track*)
    (mapcar 'makelabel (aref (get '*track* 'clips) 0))
    (mapcar 'makelabel (get '*track* 'clips)))