Hi, I’m new on this forum, so I hope I am in the correct place to offer some feedback and make suggestions. I use Audacity every day for processing mp3s in various ways, usually chart music which needs slight adjustment. I also use it to master my own Cubase composition tracks outside Cubase. I absolutely love Audacity for everything it does.
I have to scroll around quite a bit, and holding the Ctrl key and using the mouse wheel works great. The only problem is when I accidentally move my cursor over the unusualy vertical waveform visual controller / band towards the left, it scrolls the waveform askew. I find this really annoying! I then have to carefully put the panning back to zero so the waveform looks right again. It seems like a very unusual and specific function to be able to edit so freely and accidentally, and I wondered if this could be automatically locked so it can’t be accidentally skewed when working quickly across hundreds of tracks. There could be a little lock button in the middle, or a double click on it, changing it a different colour so you know you are editing it, if you want to access this feature by scrolling. I don’t know of any other software which makes the waveform scroll up or down in such a way, and I can’t think why it would be needed. I have never scrolled it and then listened or exported like this to test it, as it seems so wrong and unwanted!
Another idea is to display somewhere (maybe in the bottom bar - sorry, I know you have just tidied it up!) the number of tracks we have open. I usually have more tracks than the screen can fit so I am always scrolling up and down. I often have windows explorer on the other screen, which displays the number of files bottom left. If Audacity could also display the number of tracks I would know that I have all the tracks open. For me it would certainly be nice to have this information displayed, as I regulary edit and export humdreds of tracks at once using Export Multiple, and my process can involve copying bits to other tracks and then Mix & Render to New Track etc., so the number of tracks goes up and down and I hate ending up with duplicates and rendom exports. At present, i have no way of knowing how many tracks I still have, if I started with, for example, the 487 shown in Explorer.
I also wondered if a dark version of Audacity is likely. Many other programs now have a dark theme and at the moment Audacity is the only program I use which is still quite light, making heavy use tiring for the eyes. It would make me use it even more! Also it would look super-modern!
I also wondered if it would be possible to have different standard heights of waveform displays. There seem to be 4 main sizes of track height. The main one I use is the size it defaults to when I drag a track in. I can see the waveform nice and big. I normally drag in more than 10 tracks, so I can see about 2.4 tracks on my screen at this height. Personally I find this size just a bit too big for looking at multiple tracks on the screen together without scrolling, and to narrow for editing nuts and bolts.
When I go View > Track Size, this option of roughly 2.4 tracks on the screen is not accessible from here, only by dragging tracks in. In View > Track Size, I can collape all tracks, which makes them only the height of track name and the “select” button. I find this useful if I am using “align end to end”. When I expand tracks from View > Track Size, it fits about 9 tracks on my screen - too narrow to so much editing. When I select “fit to height” I can’t see a change. Some additional standard height options would be really useful here. The first height which would be useful to me would mean we can see all the info in the left bar including the text “32 bit float”. This would enable me to scroll up and down all the tracks, make sure the waveforms are all roughly the same amount of “blue” against “grey” (i.e. going to export at roughly the same volume), all with a tiny gap at the start, and a similar fade at the end. I know sounds very unmusical / unscientific, but the visual aspects of Audacity really help me work. I scroll up and down all the edited tracks to make sure they all look right visually before Export to see if I notice anything I’ve missed. Having all the tracks half the “dragged-in height” would show me a summary of them nicely. The second height I would request would be just for the track I am working on, to make the waveform about full height on the screen, like in the Cubase edit window. So if there was a button in the side bar to make the height double the current “Expanded” height (or a keyboard shortcut), it would save me having to drag the bottom down to a random amount. Randomness is not good generally, as I try to compare the look and sound of tracks. So if these two additional waveform heights were added I would be in heaven!
It would be even better (but perhaps more difficult to program) if we could type in the track height in pixels or some arbitrary number. This way we could select all tracks and type a number that we personally know we like. So I might know I use select all followed by “7” for comparing the look of lots of tracks, and “18” which makes a track full height, for me to edit in detail. Or there could be a slider.
Thank you for a truly wonderful free product. It is very highly regarded here. x