Sorry being dense again…
Looking in the HELP file, what keywords does one use to find an explanation for the two shades of blue in the Audio Track Display? The BLUE shade is for peaks? and the lighter grey shade means noise??? What is the purpose and advantage of the two shades?
This is embarrassing. 
-Ed
The outer dark shade shows the peak level. The inner lighter shade shows the RMS level (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_mean_square).
Thanks man,
Can someone point to where the two shades are described in the HELP manual, please.
They aren’t yet (somewhat of an oversight) - But Steve’s placed a ToDo for us to do it for the next release (the one after the upcoming 2.1.2).
The page you’d expect to see it on is: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/audio_tracks.html
WC
It is there in at least one place:
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/audacity_waveform.html.
Gale
Oh so there is, but even I as a Manual editor, overlooked and forgot about that one
So, Gale, when we update the Manual later should we duplicate the information from Waveform onto the Tracks page - or just add a link?
Peter
How about redoing the image at http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/audio_tracks.html#stereo to include arrows pointing to peak and RMS? You could move the left channel and right channel arrows into space above/below the waveform.
Gale
this is me bookmarking this thread …
I think you guys did a great job on the manual. It’s very technical yet concise. The trouble I have is trying to figure what Key Word to search for… that is, what nomenclature the Manual uses.
Another constructive comment: I see the Images or figures are PNG which is good. That’s a lossless compressed format which is great for charts and graphs, etc. Some of the PNGs look a little blurry, and that may be because the size of the screen cap was scaled bigger. You might want to do some of those figures over.
-Ed
A good place to start looking for things in the manual is the first page.
There is a picture of the full Audacity interface and it is clickable - hover your mouse pointer over the picture and it will tell you what that part of the interface is called - click on it and it will take you to the relevant page of the manual.
The front page of the manual also lists many of the important issues that users most frequently need help with.
If there are any specific ones could you send waxcylinder a private message saying which they are? I assume you have zero zoom level in your browser?
We do try to avoid browser scaling but I think a few images are scaled in an image editor to fit 1024 px wide monitors. We make one exception to that with the big image on the front page which should fit 1366 px.
Gale