Disclaimer; if any of these issues are easily fixable, my bad but the lack of a manual (why???) doesn’t help. This is the view of a very casual and pretty amateur user of Audacity as their only DAW, maybe there are accessibility reasons for these changes but for my purposes, they’re a nuisance.
As an amateur VA that thanked the freeware gods for Aud3, out of everything that’s changed in 4.0, the single most annoying feature is the playhead behaviour. Before it was quite easy to control Audacity via the left side of the keybord alone (very useful in a recording booth) but now it’s a constant kerfuffle trying to rearrange the playhead for BOTH recording and playback purpose. Examples below;
- Ctrl+Z, R was an easy setup. The playhead would move back to it’s original position before the Undo. Now the playhead remains where it is AFTER the Undo. e.g. From 0.00 seconds I record a 10 sec clip, then a 15 sec clip, using undo the playhead remains at the 25 sec mark meaning I need to manually move it back to 10 sec or end up with multiple empty spaces of audio. This is a seemingly small issue but when you’re recording alot of takes etc it becomes a nightmare.
- Selecting audio via click and drag only affects editing and not play back. This is just nuts. Now the playhead is independent of this and instead of just being able to listen to the selected audio before I edit it, it’s a pain in the arse of moving the playhead and engaging a loop.
- Ctrl+A no longer affects the playback either. Only editing. Now you have to move your playhead back to the start.
- Home and End DON’T WORK this would have been a stopgap fix to point 1 and 3 but they just straight up don’t seem work as a shortcut. Not that this was a particularly good solution in the first place as it’s an extra unneccessary step, another pointless complication.
There are a number of other obvious issues; No chains/macros, crashing upon saves/opening new projects, shortcuts not saving between sessions BUT playhead behaviour is the obvious one where it just worked better before 4 and the changes seem intentional.