After 20+ years of Pro Tools I have made the jump to a Mic Port Pro/Audacity setup. For the life of me I can not figure out where the regions are once I have edited them from a session! The answer is probably right in front of me; however, I am stumped!
In a Pro Tools session, when something is edited out of a recording it just shows up to the right of the mixing board in Regions. Not so with Audacity.
ProTools and Audacity are very different types of program. ProTools is a “real-time DAW” (digital audio workstation) whereas Audacity is a wave editor (sample editor). The two types of program are as different as dance is from sculpture, a movie from a photograph, or a play from a painting. Consequently the concepts involved in using them effectively are quite different and you can’t really compare one with the other.
As a “wave editor”, you could perhaps think of Audacity as like a word processor for audio. When you use a command in Audacity, it is applied to the audio immediately. Commands can in most cases be applied either to the entire project, or just a selected part of it (which is referred to as a “selection”). For example, you can select and cut part of a track. Whereas in ProTools deleted audio is actually just “hidden”, in an editor, when a selection is deleted, it is deleted immediately (gone). Similarly if you apply an effect, the effect is applied immediately and changes the audio data immediately and permanently (though like in a word processor, you can use Ctrl+Z to undo the last action, and there are unlimited levels of undo).