Hi, I use Audacity to the daily work on the radio.
One of the most annoying things is the blockage of editing during the playback. The ideal program which allowed that was Cool Edit 2.0.
In version 2.1.1 of Audacity it was possible to cut paths and combine them during the playback.
In version 2.1.2. even the pause/stop controlled by the space, while selecting the chart, doesn’t work, so you have to stop playback, edit and resume again… That really makes my work extremely difficult and much longer.
We are likely to make that more intuitive in the next release or the release after that, but it means signifcant changes to the playback internals of Audacity.
Meantime, if you are playing the track without a selection region present, I recommend you use the SHIFT + A shortcut when you want to stop playback and edit. That shortcut sets the cursor at the point where playback stops.
Do you mean that you can no longer use SPACE to play while dragging a selection with the mouse?
If so, that has happened because the interface toolkit we use to build Audacity no longer allows shortcuts to be used when the mouse is down. This is generally safer, because there is crash potential using shortcuts when the mouse is down.
However we recognise that makes the workflow you had more difficult. Would it help if we made it so that you played, expanded the selection while the mouse is still down, then playback continued to the end of the new selection? And that if you released the mouse, the expanded or contracted selection started playing from the start? Or something else?
Meantime I recommend you try Timeline Quick-Play. Using that, you can drag a selection in the Timeline above the waveform, then release to play the selection.