Hello!
I’ve searched high and low and turned off everything I could find related to snapping from the ‘snap to’ options to unchecking the ‘Enable dragging of left and right selection edges’, and still I get a dreaded selection yellow line snap to the ends of tracks if I have two or more stacked on top.
(see attached pic)
Is there any way to remove that snapping behavior?
Thank you.
“Snap To” in Selection Toolbar does not turn the Boundary Snap Guides on and off, except in the sense that if you set the time format to a coarse distinction such as seconds (right-click over the time digits) and your boundary is not at a whole seconds point or whatever the time format is, you won’t be able to snap at the boundary and won’t see the yellow line.
The Guides cannot be turned off directly. You can also drag faster then you may not see the Guides when you transgress a physical boundary.
Why do you dislike the Guides?
Gale
Thanks for the reply.
I’m a teacher and need to do a lot of syncing of sound clips to text.
Basically I load up a bunch of sound clips of the dialogue or text that I need to teach and use audacity to see exactly where each word ends and the other begins to sync a line under each word as it’s read.
And it’s all nice and dandy with text read slowly where there are long enough silences between each word so that a few tenths of a second don’t matter, but if I have someone speaking really fast, and I try to pin point a tiny ‘a’ or a ‘the’, it’s very hard when audacity keeps snapping my selection to end of some of the other 5-6 clips above.
So it’s not an aesthetic issue, it’s something that sometimes hinders my workflow a lot!
Sure I could just load one clip at a time, but that is very counterproductive.
Anyway, if anyone knows a way to get rid of this ‘feature’, or get around it somehow, I’m all ears.
Thanks!
For precise alignment, try zooming in a bit closer. The quick way to zoom in and out is “Ctrl + Mouse Wheel”.
The way that I would tackle the job would be to quickly position the audio clips in approximately the correct places, then at a higher zoom level, work through the clips in order, adjusting their positions precisely.
(A convenient way to scroll the display is “Shift + Mouse Wheel”)
Thanks!
That’s what I’ve been doing but thought there might be a way to disable it.
There is no way to disable the Guides (without editing the source code and recompiling Audacity).
It still sounds as if it’s an aesthetic/distraction issue. It is not a hard snap.
Gale
Dear Gale!
I just registered to the forums to write this reply. I have the same issue. This is not an aesthetic one, really slows me down. I’m willing to recompile the source code. Could you please point me in the right direction which part should I comment out?
I’m sorry for necroing the thread.
Waiting for your reply:
Misi
Gale Andrews is no longer with us. He passed away in 2017 (https://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/User:Galeandrews)
There’s been a lot of code refactoring in the current Audacity 2.3.3 development code, which I’m still trying to get to grips with, but I’d suggest that you look in the file Snap.cpp.
I’m totally puzzled - just how does this slow you down? 
WC
I’d also be interested to know the answer to that.
Your puzzlement is puzzling. Seems fairly obvious why this slows people down. If I constantly have to zoom in to move a clip just slightly past the next clip on the bar above that’s a time waster. PLUS when I zoom in I have to take time to reorient my relative position. It seems such a simple fix. It’s been bugging a lot of people for years.
How far past the next clip do you want to move it?
Say the length of your project is 3 minutes and you are zoomed out to see the entire project. The snapping effect occurs within around 0.5 seconds of the edge of a clip. If this snapping effect was turned off, then it only makes a difference if you want to move it less than 0.4 seconds from the end of another clip. If you want to move, say 0.1 seconds past the end of another clip, then it is impossible to do so at this zoom level, because 0.1 seconds is less than 1 screen pixel. You have to zoom in if you want to drag that accurately, even if snapping were turned off. At this zoom level it is very difficult to judge more accurately than about +/- 1/4 second.
The point about snapping, is that it allows you to line up clips accurately without having to zoom in really close. This can significantly speed up the process of aligning clips.
According to the user feedback that we have received, it has been bugging less than a handful users, out of millions of users. We get a lot more requests for “more” snapping (such as snapping to zero crossings, and snapping to beats)
My puzzlement is because you were commenting on “Disabling yellow Boundary Snap Guides” as the title of this thread suggests.
My puzzlement is because I totally fail to see how a “yellow Boundary Snap Guide” can in any way slow you, or your workflow, down.
WC