der_zi
January 27, 2022, 6:00pm
1
When you are editing a long audio and/or you have heavily zoomed in, Navigating left and right using the lower scroll bar can get quite fiddly.
Therefore I would like to suggest to implement “drag scrolling” or “drag navigation” in the form that you press a mouse button on one of the audio tracks or the “Timeline Ruler” at the top, and the view moves left or right with your mouse so that the same point of the displayed track stays under the cursor as long as the mouse button is kept pressed. (It is important to notice that only the displayed area should be moved, not any objects in respect to each other, so this is a purely navigational feature, not an editing feature)
As dragging with the left mouse button pressed is already taken for selecting, it has to be one of the other two buttons, which (in the selection tool and on Windows) currently don’t do anything when dragging.
Several GIS and Graphics Applications like Inkscape have this feature as Middle Mouse Dragging, which works independently of which tool is currently active.
Best regards.
2 Likes
I shared your frustration and only now found out:
You can drag the bar where the file name / track name says!
My mistake; that actually moved the entire track. But I could move it back to the snap start and then it was fine.
Anyway; I wholly support your feature request.
Corvus
July 13, 2023, 1:24am
4
This is a pretty basic feature at this point so I support it. It’d be way more useful and intuitive than the current Shift + Scroll workaround.
this is something I’d like us to add in the future; you can follow the feature request on github here:
opened 03:24PM - 27 Nov 20 UTC
Enhancement Request
feature tweak
I don't use audacity often but when I do, I often have to use it in very short s… tints, or I am risking smashing keyboard or throwing away my mouse :).
All joking aside, I do believe in what I now call "reorient" principle. Point of this principle is to pan around ever so often using middle mouse button to gain perspective.
This will be lengthier because of the high level concept involved. First I will describe what I mean by "reorient", and then I will explain how I think it applies to audacity.
I learned to use "reorient" for the first time, when I was working as game developer, and I was taught it by more experienced colleagues, 3D character modellers and animators. When you are working with 3D objects, especially human faces and human bodies, it is essential to work on them in 3D space, because even slightly wrongly positioned vertices break the illusion of the object (face/head). Back then, there were no VR headsets, that would allow for true stereoscopic vision, so monitor was all you've got. Unfortunately monitor is 2D plane projection of your 3D space.
If you work on 3D model for a longer time (more like 1min) locked to a certain 2D point of view, you might end up moving vertices in such way, that model looks good from that exact 2D POV, but completely wrong from all others, eg. it looks deformed if view gets even slightly rotated.
Now, some people say that you have 4 views (top, left, right, bottom) into 3D space to avoid that happening, but colleagues taught me immediately first week, that that opinion is bollocks (which it really is). First thing is that these views are in ortographic projection (it means that perspective does not apply to them) and when we look through our eyes, our brains are using perspective projection and second thing is, that humans are not flies, or other insects, and so we don't have four-way vision, and our brains don't work very good with quadviews of 3D models. Whether we want to admit it or not, we look at objects in stereoscopic perspective.
When are using "reorient" principle, you always work in 3D in perspective mode instead of any 2D view, and every 3-30 seconds you **rotate**, **zoom** and **pan** your view back and forth slightly around the object you are editing. These shorts bursts of repositioning and rotation cause you to experience 3D-ness of the object edited even on 2D-viewplane and allows your brain to "read" perspective of the edits and visually check the shape and silhouette of the focused object. This checking is mostly feel based, not science based, and works very well for artistically based edits.
Now how does it apply to audacity? I turns out "reorient" is extremely useful even in 2D views as reorienting allows you to gain better perspective!
Some years later I worked in completely different field, on database schemas and we used SQL editor with combined SQL REPL and 2D based graphical database diagram view. It turned out, reorient principle worked here perfectly, even on huge 2D database schema canvases. When studying or modifying schemas, I would quickly circle-pan around tables and relations, quickly zooming in and out and this would allow me to notice more of the actual database situation, then to stare dumbly into tiny 2D viewpoint of table I was editing!
This was in 00-10s, I was still using windows for GUI back then. In that timeframe, cca 98-2007, it was customary to have pan bound to middle mouse button in high performance professional windows GUI programs.
Now when I moved to *nix system administration, post 2007, I didn't use GUIs that much. But every time I tried to do anything in *nix GUI software I ended up laughing hysterically, facepalming, or wanting to break keyboard in rage. Almost every major GTK based software has almost completely broken panning on *nix. At first I thought it was only *nix GUI problem but later I found out in the mean time the situation became equally tragic on all platforms.
The point is that universal panning behavior with "middle mouse button pressed" got fucked up globally. These days even windows programs don't know how to pan with middle mouse and this is getting worse by day. Causes for this are outside of the scope of the issue discussed here, but could be summarized by pandering to lowest common denominator (notebook touchpads, touch tablets, and retarded apple magic mouse).
But, when you are using audacity on your workstation to edit sound, you are not working in some constrained environment. You are using proper equipment like full sized keyboard and proper fully fledged 3-button mouse.
I think in workstation situation pan mode is not out of question and I believe it would bring new qualities to audacity sound editing.
As such I propose to implement ability to pan view of all tracks while "Middle Mouse" is being held. Now of course I explored all the possibilities of audacity and I know there is option to use Shift+"Middle Scroll" to pan track view around, but this is not as efficient as "Middle Mouse Hold" pan. This "view pan" mode would be only similar to Shift + "Middle Scroll", as it should be relative to onscreen cursor movement instead of scrollwheel turns. This would combine better Ctrl+"Middle Scroll" for zooming and "Middle Scroll" for scrubbing, for example.