Audacity Forum

@Oldbear, As Koz has pointed out this is not an Audacity problem. However, just to point you in the right direction, you need to turn off the screen-saver and look into the power management settings. There you will find values controlling when the hard-drive shuts down, when the monitor shuts down, ...

...how can i merge... Define what you mean by "merge". Do you want them to play one after the other? Then follow Koz's advice. Do you want them to be blended together (we call that "mixing")? In which case you can use the Gain sliders (labelled with a + and a -) in the panel at the left of each tra...

Audacity doesn't do anything in real-time, except record. It is, primarily, a sound editor. Once you have your 70 minutes of recording, there are ways of speeding up the workflow to cut it into 7 minute chunks. However, you will have to wait for an appropriately skilled elf to come online. That kind...

Thanks. All this is new to me and I'm quite lost. Ok, Marsha, let's step back away from all this technicality. It confuses me sometimes, too! Square one: what do you want to use Audacity for? To record an instrument that you play? To record your own voice? To record services at your local church? I...

If you are using your mouse to navigate to the Cut command in the drop downs from the menu bar, why not mouse over to the "Cut" button on the Edit toolbar?

@paulgk, Everyone gets a bit daunted by the complex terminology of a new subject, and audio is particularly complex. What you, as a novice, have to accept is that those who wrote the software knew what they were doing and have set it up to do a good job for almost everybody. And for those who aren't...

@peac, Your symptoms as described in your original post could be caused by your anti-virus/anti-malware/anti-everything else software doing a scrupulously detailed check of the file and of all changes to it. I'd make Koz's suggestion of disconnect from the Internet and disable the Anti-virus softwar...

Does this section in the Wiki help?: http://manual.audacityteam.org/help/man ... hancements

Do you have any "plug-ins" installed? This kind of behaviour can be caused by Audacity trying to load and verify a large list of plug-ins (or a list that includes ones that are not compatible with Audacity). How long have you waited for Audacity to appear?

More likely you have selected the Timeshift tool instead of the Selection tool in the Toolbar.