Crosshair Cursor in Spectral View

Audacity Help Forum macOS
1

Hello

I have searched in Google, the FAQ of Audacity and it’s DOC, and I am surprised I could not find an answer to my question:

How to enable a “Crosshair” Cursor in Audacity’s spectral views?

  • Open any audio file
  • Enable any Spectrogram for this file
  • Try to locate a precise time AND Hz intersection on the Spectrogram with a “Crosshair” Cursor.

It’s not possible?

I can workaround it by scrolling the sound track back and forth so to get precise time AND Hz of a certain sound in the track, but that is tedious if you want to compare several sounds in time…

Any tip is appreciated, even a “can’t be done”. At least I can stop looking for it :smiley:

2

No. I think you’re stuck. Analyze > Plot Spectrum does have a cross and individual readouts, but that doesn’t display time.

Koz

3

As Koz wrote, track spectrogram view does not have crosshairs.

You can get the exact time by clicking on waveform and looking at either the Timeline (above the tracks) or the Selection Toolbar.

If you enable “Spectral Selection” in Preferences (https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/spectrograms_preferences.html), and enable the “Spectral Selection toolbar” (https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/view_menu_toolbars.html), you can get an additional readout of a selected frequency range.

4

Ok, I can work with that

Any chance something similar could be added in future?
(Could I add it as a Request, what do you all think)

5

It could be added as a “feature request”, but using the “Spectral Selection toolbar” gives a numeric readout, which is a lot more accurate than trying to read the frequency from the tiny vertical scale.

Also, if you enable “Advanced vertical zooming” (https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tracks_behaviors_preferences.html), you can quickly zoom in / out on the vertical scale using a mouse.

  • Click and drag on the vertical scale to zoom in.
  • Shift + right click on the vertical scale, to zoom back out all of the way in one click.