I work on the go and ditched my mouse years ago so that I don’t have to rely on having a flat surface available to do my work. So I’m basically using my trackpad for everything, which includes Audacity.
This is a simple request to add support for pinch zooming of the waveform using the trackpad, as it would keep me in flow a lot better.
One detail: It would be nice to have a preference setting that when pinching to zoom (in or out), the waveform would re-center in the middle of the browser window, where the playhead currently is. That way you don’t have to scroll horizontally to find your playhead.
@steve Yes, trackpad gestures is fully supported by the OS (in my case Windows 11). But it is up to the application to make use of it. The feature request here is for Audacity to support pinching to zoom in/out.
@steve I was actually asking about @Wrecks0 's comment regarding:
“…waveform would re-center in the middle of the browser window, where the playhead currently is. That way you don’t have to scroll horizontally to find your playhead.”
Is there such a setting and if so, do you know where it is? I couldn’t find it.
When I have selected some audio, or just have the cursor on the waveform by clicking on it, I can use the View > Zoom > Zoom In, or the View > Zoom > Zoom Out functions (I have them mapped with Ctrl + and Ctrl - like my browser) and it will expand in/out the waveform in that spot, and move it toward the center.
Hm… ok I see what you mean, but it’s not quite what I was requesting/describing. At least for me, when I scroll horizontally to a point where the playhead is off screen, and I zoom in or out, the playhead does not re-center.
In fact even when the playhead is visible, when I zoom out, it doesn’t recenter.
But that aside, support for pinch zooming would most likely minimize the trouble of having to find the playhead again, because it would be quite easy at that point to zoom and pan using just the trackpad.
My advice: Do yourself a favour and use a mouse, tracker-ball, or similar pointing device. Using a touch-pad for audio editing is hard, even for people that regularly use touch pads. A mouse is much more accurate than a touch pad, and accuracy is important when editing audio.
For me not at all - I use pinch-to-zoom all the time. When looking at images, photo editing, video editing (zooming the timeline which is just like zooming a waveform), and for panning I use the 2-finger slide, which is supported in Audacity. It took me a few weeks to let go of the mouse/trackball and now I can work literally anywhere.
I understand if there are higher priorities but I just don’t see why Audacity wouldn’t want to support pinch-to-zoom as all it needs to do is map the gesture which is OS native, to its zoom commands…