Does Audacity 2 allow spacebar play/pause?[SOLVED]

Audacity Help Forum GNU/Linux
1

Hello.
The Audacity 1 offers the keyboard spacebar controlling play/stop.
This is not so useful to me.
Does Audacity 2 allow spacebar play/pause?
This would make Audacity much more useful in on-stage performance.

Thanks

P

2

Would that make sense to a computer program?

You can pause playback, but you can also put Audacity into “pause mode” before you start recording.
If Audacity is stopped and you press spacebar, how would Audacity know if you mean Audacity to start Play or if you want to enter Pause mode?

Switching off “Pause” is not the same as “Play” so you would need separate keys for switching Pause on and switching it off.

Keyboard shortcuts can be customized in Audacity 2.x, but I don’t think that it will be possible to set the spacebar to Play and Pause.
“Play/Stop” can be assigned as one function in the keyboard preferences (default = spacebar) or can be defined by two separate keys, one for Play and one for Stop.
To avoid ambiguities you cannot assign one key to more than one function at a time.
See here for more information: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/keyboard_preferences.html

3

Space-bar is already the default shortcut for play (from the current cursor position)

Pressing it a second time will start playback again from the current cursor position.

P is the default k/b shortcut for Pause (and unpause) - pressing it once will stop at the current playback (or record position) pressing it again will restart playback from where it is paused.

BTW you need to be sure that you are not editing a label when you try to use the shortcut keys.

WC

4

If SHIFT + A (Play/Stop and Set Cursor) helps, do this:

  1. Edit > Preferences, choose “Keyboard” on the left
  2. Select the “Command” category
  3. Press “P” on your keyboard twice to find “Play/Stop”; press “Clear” to remove the binding to Space
  4. On the line below “Play/Stop”, select “Play/Stop and Set Cursor”
  5. Click in the text box and press Space on your keyboard
  6. Press “Set” then “OK”.

Now you can use Space to start playback, or stop it. Press Space again to restart playback from the previous Stop point. This is a good way to male edits at the stop point then resume playback from there.


Gale

5

Wow, I think that this is what I’m looking for…

So by “Press Space again to restart playback from the previous Stop point”, you mean from a new Stop point that I set when I stopped it?

Like (Space)…song 1 plays…(space)…track stops…(space)…song 2 plays…(space)…track stops…(space)…song 3 plays… et cetera?

This would make me very happy…

PB

PS Just because the space bar would be easier to hit on stage with everything going on…

6

Oh, I just was able to remap Pause/Unpause) to the spacebar in Audacity 1.2…

For some reason you kind of have to bang on it to make the remap happen – I guess I wasn’t persistent enough when I tried before…

Thank you very much…

P

7

If you clear the binding for Space (which you now have allocated to “Play/Stop and Set Cursor”) then yes you can allocate Space to “Pause”. But then you have to use some other shortcut to actually start and stop, and you cannot edit or save work while paused.



Gale