Editing is disabled during playback. I only need delete in order to remove undesired sections, that’s my main use for the program.
Using GoldWave, I was used to listening non-stop, and whenever I would encounter a sound that needed to be edited out, I would just select it, hit DEL and CTRL+S.
If it were possible to select, delete and save the track without interrupting the listening, it would significantly simplify and speed up my work.
If applicable, the cursor could be simply moved to the first non-deleted sample and playback could automatically continue from there. Otherwise, deleting could be limited to sections that do not include the current cursor.
Thank you for your suggestion. Unfortunately I think it is highly unlikely that this could be possible in Audacity in the foreseeable future. Goldwave has a very different architecture from Audacity regarding its handling of audio. Goldwave’s design implements a kind of “virtual editing” that provides very fast and slick editing of a single audio file, whereas Audacity’s design is based on “block files”, which provides complex manipulation of multiple tracks at arbitrary sample rates simultaneously. With Audacity’s design it would be extremely difficult to implement real-time / on the fly editing safely.
Hi Steve, and thank you for the explanation. Maybe in the remote future Audacity could earn a “single-track” mode geared towards simple guys like me.
Would it be more feasible to save/export during playback? I imagine these two operations should not interfere with each other and could go on independently. I really had a need for this one/two years ago, when for no apparent reason Audacity would crash on me every few minutes.
Trying to make Audacity run reliably on three different platforms, with a huge range of computers from ancient single processor 386 machines to state of the art multi-processor machines, is no easy task. Implementing “virtual editing” in Audacity would be a huge change to the code, and asking a machine to simultaneously write t disk, while modifying the project, while playing, and to do so safely without corrupting data (on any machine or any platform) and without crashing, is a lot to ask. If you really need this functionality, then Goldwave is probably your best bet.
For audio editing, I think Audacity does a pretty good job of being most things to most people, but we accept that it will never be all things to all people 