I recently had to replace my computer, and upon resuming work on a project I had been in the middle of, I found it difficult adjusting to the feel of the freshly installed Audacity 3.7.1.
I chalked it up to just not being used to it, but when I went back later to make more precise adjustments, I found some extremely basic edits flat-out impossible.
For the sake of simplicity, here’s a short video of about half a dozen of these issues I’ve ran into. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnp2os_a_3k
I did notice that my mouse did accidentally touch the third track at the point where it was selected, but the fact that it remained selected after I dragged back to cover just the first and second tracks… is really bad.
Are at least some of these things hidden in toggles and settings to get the timeline behaviour more in line with earlier releases? Barring that, where can I download a legacy version of Audacity, because frankly I don’t think I can continue working on my project with some of these barriers.
Is there a way to convert .aup3 files to .aup? It would be a real bummer if after all of this I had to redo a bunch of work as well.
You can find old versions here: https://www.fosshub.com/Audacity-old.html. You don’t say which version of Audacity you were using before your computer upgrade. Based on my own experience, I suggest installing version 3.3.3 and nothing later than that.
I don’t think you can convert an aup3 project to aup but you could export each project as a WAV file and import that into your legacy version of Audacity.
Mark B
The setting you’re looking for is probably Preferences → Track behavior → Editing a clip can move other clips.
I’ve got some good news for you for the future though: In Audacity 4, selecting multiple clicks will be a thing, as will different global ripple editing (which is the “official” term for moving clips on all tracks forward when you go delete parts of one of them)
You would find the selections you are making in your video much easier and quicjer if you zoomed out - personally I would zoom the entire project to fit on the scree, there is a zoom button to do precisely that, or the shortcut on Windows is Ctrl+F
Note too that you can select a whole track (without it even being entirely visible) by clicking in the white space of its Track Control Panel.
I did end up zooming out more to make selections, but there are selection starting/ending points and timing adjustments I’m making on the hundredths of seconds scale, so it’s a lot of going back and forth zooming in and out. Selecting the entire track also doesn’t work, because I can’t toggle off the individual clips I have already edited from that selection.
Sync locking did help in a couple of places, but if I tried to select a clip and the one after it, in cases where the first clip was overlapping with the end of the previous clip a little bit, it would select that too, so it was a lot of going back and forth flipping it on and off again when I did or did not want overlapping vs non-overlapping clips getting lumped in with the selection.
In general, a lot of the awkwardness I experienced was trying to select two clips if there was something between them, like on track 1 and track 3 but not wanting to grab what’s on track 2, or if there is a clip between two others on the same track, though in the case of the latter, I think that was always a limitation of audacity I’m used to working around.
I also want to say thank you to everyone who commented, between the suggestions I was at was able to finish up that portion of the audio and can try out a couple of other things to figure out what works best for me going forwards.
You might find it helpful to drop temporary labels at your precise start and end points while zoomed in - then zoom out so both labels are visible on screen. Then you can use the cursor to select from label to label, the yellow snap guides will help you with this.