How to cleanly and crisply repeat a section.

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1
  1. I put down a click track.
  2. I record 12 bars of some music.
  3. I want to just copy and paste that 12 bars so that I have 24 bars.
  4. I zoom way in with the magnifier in order to put the cursor right at the beginning of the 12 bars.
  5. I then have to scroll forever to get to the end of those 12 bars and finish the selecting/copying.

I wish after clicking at the beginning of the 12 bars I could zoom out, then scroll over, then zoom in again at the end and finish the selecting. Is there a way to do that? Or, alternatively, is there an easier way to do precise copy and pastes?

Thanks.

2

Do you have a wheel mouse?

Ctrl+Mouse Wheel to zoom in/out
Shift+Mouse Wheel to scroll left/right

Some way to jump easily from one end of a selection to the other might be useful - what do you think?

3

You Da Man.

Not sure I follow. You got more tricks?

4

There’s lots of tricks in Audacity for navigating and selecting - quite a few are detailed here: Audacity Manual

but the one thing that I’ve not found a really convenient way of doing, is to jump from one end of a selected section to the other (without losing the selected region). Zooming in and out with the mouse wheel works well, but sometimes I think it would be useful to just be able to press a key to jump from the start of the selection to the end of the selection (like how you can use the Home and End keys to jump from the start to the end of the project).

5

A cursor and a selection can’t co-exist, so you mean e.g. RIGHT moves the cursor to the end of the selection and removes it, then some other modifier with LEFT moves the cursor to what was the start of the selection before you pressed RIGHT?

As of now, you could Edit > Region Save then Edit > Region Restore (not too bad with shortcuts).

I would do it by CTRL + I to split the selection, then double-click before LEFT or RIGHT does what you want.



Gale

6

Pictures probably help:

Say I’ve made an approximate selection:
region.png
Then to adjust the start position precisely I zoom in on the start:
zoom-left.png
I now want to adjust the end of the selection, so I press [some keyboard combination] to view the right end of the selection:
jump-to-right.png
After adjusting that to what I think looks about right, I want to check the beginning of the selection, so I press [some other keyboard combination] to view the left end of the selection:
jump-to-left.png
Being able to do this is quite an important feature for editing loops.
Have I missed a trick?

7

I think it’s a weakness for more than just loops. Save/Restore Region or splitting the region. together with LEFT or RIGHT work fine if the region doesn’t change.

I guess you are asking for new View commands, “Center at Selection Left” and “Center at Selection Right” or similar? I’m +1 on that.


Gale

8

Yes, something like that.