By the subject heading I mean a way of vertically expanding the waveform - so that eventually it fills the track strip. I struggled to find this in Audacity, I did succeed but now it seems to have disappeared.
I’m not wishing to change the actual volume level, just the graphic display. Copious suggestions regarding the zoom function however the zoom only expands and decreases the waveform in proportion to the negative space. What I want is to enhance the spikes so I can easily see a hum or a small pop. It’s a basic function, it’s really beyond my bleeding eyes why it should be so hard to locate on the display and why the subject does not come up more easily in a web search. But there you go. Really grateful for any help here, thanks,
That’s how waveforms work and it’s the same reason correction software has trouble find clicks and pops.
You may like a different view. Switch to Spectrogram View with the drop-down menu to the left of the track. Different types of sound show up as different colors.
If you place the cursor over the 0.0 on the vertical scale, then you can use the mouse buttons to zoom in/out …
see … Zooming Overview - Audacity Manual [ vertical zooming is at bottom of that page ]
I have a non-free program called [u]Wave Repair[/u] for removing clicks & pops from digitized vinyl. It automatically zooms vertically to fit the space when you zoom-in horizontally… When you’re looking just the quiet part of a waveform it looks “loud”… When you’re looking at the whole file, it looks normal. But usually, I have to use the Spectral View first to “find” the defect.
I’m not sure if there’s any easy way to “see” hum. If you have 50/60Hz hum you can use a notch filter or regular Noise Reduction on the whole file.
