How do I keyboard seek to earlier than the cursor?

Having a weird bug/issue.

I’m trying to transcribe a recording, which involves lots of stops, starts, and rewinding various distances.

I see I can seek forward and back by 1 or 15 seconds at a time using the left/right arrow keys and shift+left/right, but it seems unable to seek any earlier than the cursor position.

Obviously people will want to be able to seek freely throughout the file and not get stuck on the cursor, since the cursor position is generally meaningless during playback.

So, how does one disable that sort of “snapping” effect where it gets stuck on the cursor when trying to rewind with the left arrow key?

Thanks in advance!

To clarify: when I said “cursor” above, turns out I actually meant the “Start” (basically the line that it puts at the point where I played from any given time I press play)

That behaviour is intentional. The “play from” cursor position acts as a “fixed” reference point when moving around in the project. That is, it is “fixed” until you move it to another location in the project. The quickest way to move it to another location is to use the mouse to click on the waveform.

For users that prefer to, or need to use keyboard navigation rather than mouse, there’s a whole bunch of keyboard shortcuts available: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/navigation_tips.html

For people that like to use the mouse (or other pointing device), there is also “Quick Play” via the Timeline ruler at the top of the tracks panel: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/timeline.html#tqp

There is also “scrubbing” and “seeking”: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/scrubbing_and_seeking.html