Audacity Forum

We assume you're using Audacity 2.0.5. If not, you should update Audacity.

Start or restart Audacity cold. Don't open anything.

Generate > Tone > OK. Use the defaults.

Do you get a tone on the timeline and does it play?

Koz

Use the little black down-arrow menu to the left of the track and change rate from 44100 to 48000. Did that cure it?

Koz

Are you playing your trumpet into your microphone? Many microphones will fail if you do that.
Koz

Or we could design Scrubbing just like every video editor on earth, every mechanical editor and some digital sound editors. But if you use this and want to work on both ends of the zoomed in selection, another useful pair of commands is View > Go to Selection Start (CTRL + [ ) and Go to Selection En...

No, the recording is toast.
Koz

You should update to Audacity 2.0.5 right away. After you do, make a new "fake" long recording and see if it still does it.

Did you update to Mavericks over an old OS-X?

Koz

You may be experiencing the shock of using a good microphone. Make a scratchy recording with the new microphone and click View > Show Clipping. If your blue waves turn into a forrest of red lines, you are overloading the sound channel. The blue waves are never supposed to go all the way up and down,...

When you play them, do you get the bouncing sound meter and blue waves? http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/Audacity1_playback.jpg Sometimes, it's a little rough to get across the difference between "it's not playing" and "I can't hear it." They're different. If the only thing that ha...

Drag-select some portion of the blue waves. Command-E Zoom into it. Command-3 zoom out a little bit and Command-F zoom out to the full song. Command-E's official name is Zoom Into Selection. If you don't select anything, it doesn't work. For example, if you want to accurately snip off the noisy end ...

Sorry. You're on a Mac. It's Command-E, Command-3 and Command-F.
Koz