This is not a major problem, just so long as I’m paying attention, but just recently (so I’m guessing in my ignorance the fault is mine) when I highlight a track and go to apply an effect, all my tracks get auto selected when I hit OK. This is usually obvious as I’m very quickly aware that the progress bar is moving very slowly, but sometimes if I only have two or three tracks in place, I’m not quick enough and the effect gets applied to everything.
As I say, not a biggy, as there’s always the undo button, but am I missing something fundamental here?
Yes, you’re using a very old version of Audacity which has a peculiar feature enabled by default called “Select All if None Selected”, which means that if you don’t have an audio selection, then Audacity automatically selects the entire project.
In the current Audacity 2.3.0 version, if you do not have an audio selection and try to apply an effect, Audacity just reminds you that you need to make an audio selection first.
It’s about time I updated, but I have this irrational thought process based on the ‘if it ain’t broke…’ principle, which convinces me that if I update I’ll lose not so much the functionality, but the familiarity of the version I’m using.
Silly, I know. I’ll update.
All that said, your explanation doesn’t altogether add up, because this happens to me when I have highlighted an individual track.
I just tested on 2.1.1 - default settings i.e. “Select all if none …” = “on”
imported two stereo tracks
select one of the two tracks
Effect >Amplify
result => only the selected track is amplified
Undo Amplify
make no selection or a point selection in either track
Effect >Amplify
result => both the selected tracks are amplified
Exppected and correvt behaviors - so I cannot reproduce what you report.
But I do urge you to update to the latest release - we have fixed a lot of bugs since 2.1.1 and add a lot of useful features. And the interface is not significantly different, you should feel right at home.
It’s more than possible I’m mistaken on this, or that I’m simply doing something inadvertently.
Now, I was going to start a new thread on updating, but in that the talk has swayed that way here, I’ll air a couple of concerns if I may.
When I set up the version of Aud I have now (2.1.1) the feature I wanted more than any other was the ability to record audio right from the source (youtube etc). I hardly ever import audio because I like to keep file sizes down.
Now, I eventually got this working but it took a fair bit of digging on the internet to find out exactly what configuration I needed (for whatever reason it wasn’t set to allow internal recording (for want of the correct terminology) by default.
The other main issue I had was finding and installing the MP3 exporter plug-in.
Can you either confirm that the latest version has these two things set up by default, or assure me it’s a very simple process to get it configured as such?
If you are just updating Audacity, you will probably find that you don’t need to do the set-ups again as Audacity will probably pick them up from your current installation, but the links above provide the info if you need it.