Cannot select more than one track

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

Hi and thanks for the opportunity to voice my problem.

I cannot seem to select more than one track in Audacity 2.4.2. All other functions using Windows 10 so far are working OK as far as I can tell.

I use the CTRL key to try to select non-adjacent tracks and the SHIFT key to select more than one adjacent tracks and it will only select one track at a time.

I tested the keyboard with other programs and in Windows explorer and the CTRL and SHift keys are working fine. Uninstalled Audacity and then reinstalled it and it is still doing the same thing Any suggestions?

Many thanks,

Chuck Schoon :stuck_out_tongue:
Durham, NC

1 Like
2

Does “Ctrl + A” select all of the tracks?

3

Yes. But that is not the problem.

I can only select one track or all of them. The CTRL / SHIFT keys are not responding so that I can select 2, or 3, or more tracks either next to one another, or non-adjacent.

I tested the CTRL / SHIFT keys in other programs and they work fine for making selections like in Word or WIndows Explorer files.

The manuals say that using the CTRL key while making selections will enable you to select multiple tracks whether next to one another or not, and the SHIFT key while selecting tracks enables you to select multiple tracks that are all next to one another.

4

But it demonstrates that Audacity is correctly registering the Ctrl key.


Yes. Are you “Ctrl + clicking” on the “Select” button on the left end of the tracks?

5

I totally agree! I love Audacity but its method of selecting multiple chunks of audio is very frustrating. Control and shift don’t work the way they do in other programs. For example, let’s say I have 4 stereo tracks. I click on the title of the first one and it selects it all, but I want to select two or more of these tracks and then move them together. So I hold down Ctrl, or Shift, or Ctrl+Shift, and then click on the title of the 2nd track. This selects the 2nd track but it also de-selects the first track! Here’s an awkward work-around for this problem: Instead of clicking on the title bar, you have to click in the left channel and then carefully drag the mouse down and to the right across all 4 tracks. Doing this, you can eventually get all 4 tracks selected but if you don’t do it just right, or let the mouse move over into the wrong region, you lose the selection. To me, Audacity has a similar problem to Libre Calc. Everybody has Excel and hates the bugs (and the price!). So Calc comes along with open source and fixes the stuff we hated, but unfortunately they also try to reinvent the parts of Excel that were already perfect. Audacity isn’t nearly as bad as Libre and Open Office. I really love a lot of its features and it doesn’t have the passive-aggressive feeling of Libre, but this one aspect - selection of multiple regions - doesn’t have to be so hard. Just make it work like the other programs in regard to shift and control selection!!

Hopefully someone has a better, smoother work-around than what I’m describing. I really love this program and I’m determined to stick with it.

1 Like
6

I agree 100% with the above comment. I’m a long time Audacity user, since the original version, and usually the changes improve the workflow and make tasks easier. I really appreciate Audacity for it’s audio editing features, but feel it necessary to add my two cents here:

Last night while preparing a monthly radio show, I must have spent over an hour trying to select two audio clips so that I could join them together after an edit.

The solution I kept finding was to move the mouse down diagonally over the tracks to be selected, but this wouldn’t work for me. I use MacOS, and was a bit baffled that using CMD would de-select the previous clip that was selected, and SHIFT would not select multiple clips in a sequence. Selecting Next Clip in the menu would de-select the previous clip. Another suggestion that didn’t work for me was CMD A, since that selected all clips in the project, but I only needed to join two of them together, not all of them.

So after reading the Audacity manual umpteen times, searching with different variants of my question and getting random AI generated answers, I started experimenting with this “diagonal draw” procedure. My first question was: “Where to start?” I was previously starting at the left uppermost part of the clip on the left, and then drawing down in a straight 90 degree line through the clip next to it on the right. About an hour or so later after getting exasperated and still looking for a solution, I tried clicking the mouse on the actual waveform of the clip on the left, sliding it down vertically, and then sliding it over to the right. Voila, both clips were selected, and I could finally join them using the menu commands.

I’m currently using v. 3.7.3, and had also tried loading the project with an earlier version of Audacity so that I could just click between the clip regions and “auto-join” them as was once possible, but the older version couldn’t load the project since it was created in a newer version.

My suggestions (for Mac, but could use equivalent keyboard keys in Windows):

CMD should allow the selection of multiple clips

SHIFT should allow the selection of one or more clips in sequence

If this isn’t possible, then the process of selecting more than one clip could be better explained in the manual, perhaps with screenshots of how to move the mouse to select the audio clips.
I also much prefer the previous method of joining two clips together simply by clicking on the adjacent clip region borders. Something that once took me three seconds took me at least an hour to figure out, my project is late, but after a good night’s sleep, the headache is gone, at least.