Help me solve these somewhat technical issues compared with older version

Audacity 3 Help Forum
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I used to be good with a version from like seven years ago, but I got a new computer and downloaded the newer version (as of like four months ago), and the following things are causing me problems:

  1. The spectrogram looks different than in the old version. I’m using the same mic and I sound basically the same, but the graph is obviously different. The new version shows way less “heat” in the lower frequency range. But he most problematic change is that it just looks more smeared/vague, if that makes sense. Visually picking out artefacts (clicks from mouth noise, for example) is a lot harder now. It’s like it’s become more blurry. Does anyone know what I’m talking about and have any suggestions?

  2. I used to use the “repair” effect quite often to remove artefacts, but now I keep getting the message that the highlighted area I wish to repair is too big. I’m quite familiar with how big of an area is 128 samples, like down to the pixel, when I’m repairing stuff in the spectrogram view. But with this new version I’m not even close. And I’ll toggle back to the waveform view, and sure enough, there are like 300 samples highlighted when I expected about 30 to be highlighted. Is the default sample rate now way higher than it used to be? I don’t know what the sample rate used to be. But it’s annoying to have to do some piecemeal repair of an artefact when I used to be able to just highlight the whole thing and repair in one click.

  3. Sometimes when I hold Ctrl and scroll the mouse wheel forward, it doesn’t zoom in where my cursor is. It insists on zooming in to where the playback is stopped at. I want it to zoom to where my cursor is, like it used to. Is this a bug? Can I change this?

Thanks a ton for any help. Since I’m self-taught on this, I don’t really know the lingo, and I don’t know if the way I use the software is common or wildly aberrant. But if anyone has suggestions for the above issues, I’d be very grateful.

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Change the spectrogram “window size”
Audcaity3 spectrogram demo
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/spectrogram_view.html

Spectral editing tools enable editing of bigger (longer) sections
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/spectral_selection.html

3

There have been several changes to the default settings for the track spectrogram view.
The default settings are in “Preferences > Tracks > Spectrograms”.

  • Scale: Previously “Linear”, now “Mel”.
  • Window Size: Previously 1024, now 2048.
  • Max Frequency: Previously 8000, now 20000
  • Zero Padding Factor: Previously “1”, now “2”.
  • Colors > Scheme: Previously “Classic”, now “default”.
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Thanks a lot. One more thing, if you would: Can you tell me how to make it so playback doesn’t stop when it runs into the stop/start bar? For example, I repair something, zoom out, quickplay to make sure it sounds OK, but as soon as it gets to the point where I made the fix, the playback stops. Obviously I can avoid this by remembering that after I fix something, I need to click somewhere else so as to move that stop/start bar, but this didn’t used to be the case, and I’d like to make it so again.

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