Sound samples not linking as a continuous wave.

I am using Audacity 2.2.1 with Mac OS X 10.10.5. For some reason, when I zoom into the waveform, the individual audio samples (seen as small dots) are not linked together forming one continuous sound wave. This configuration interferes with some of the functions used to edit my audio samples. How do I fix this problem? The recorded sound seems to be find otherwise.

Below are some screen shots I took, to show you what it looks like when I zoom into the waveform. This happens when I do a recording from any input source whether it’s from iTunes, YouTube, a microphone or an input from a cassette tape.

Digital audio isn’t “continuous”. It’s actually just a series of discrete numbers (called “samples”).
At high zoom levels, these samples are displayed as dots. This has not changed, except that previously the dots were drawn with lines joining each dot to the next.

In the current version of Audacity, the default display when zoomed in very close, shows the dots as “stem plots” (see: http://www.cs.tut.fi/sgn/arg/intro/basics.html)

The old way of display “joined” samples can be selected in Preferences: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tracks_preferences.html
Note that this setting has no effect on the sound, or on editing - it is purely a visual representation.

Thanks for your help Steve. I am glad the answer was that simple.
Aquinas