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.
There are many Github issues open that have to do with selections, one of which affects your item 2.
So at least the devs are talking about this. My take-away from reading a number of the issues is that there seems to be a consensus forming that dragging a selection should a) move the playhead to the start of the selection and b) there should be an easy way to play just the selection.
Fair play and for anyone reading the work around for these issues is to assign a keyboard shortcut to both move playhead to selection start/end. Ctrl+A then end for issue 1.
But again, keybinds don’t save for me so very clunky stopgap
Hear, hear.
I came looking for this. The playhead behaviour is very frustrating. There doesn’t seem to be an option to put it back to how we’re used to. That seems an enormous oversight.
I’m loving the colours, etc., but we need this functionality restored/optional.
I really love the look and upgrades they’ve made to v4, but this issue will keep me from moving over to it because it slows down my workflow significantly. As a professional podcast producer, I frequently need to try a tricky edit multiple times to get it to sound natural and create an “invisible” edit point, so being able to play a selection to hear exactly where the cut will be and then undo if necessary and have the playhead back in position at the edit point, is a must for me.
I just attempted to edit a show with v4, and this playhead behavior caused me to bail on it after getting only a couple minutes into the audio file. (That, and the fact that one of my plugins made it crash every single time I enabled it.)
Yeah, I can see why that’s frustrating. The playback/selection behavior sounds like a regression in workflow rather than just a preference change. Having to manually reposition the playhead after every undo or selection would get annoying fast, especially when recording lots of takes. Hopefully there’s a way to restore the old behavior or at least make it configurable.