I have only recently started using Audacity (having for many years used another recording application), so please forgive this very naive question. I cannot find out, either by experimenting or by reading the documentation, how to move the cursor rapidly to a position much further forward or backward in a waveform without selecting a large portion of the waveform in the process. I realize that there are quick ways of moving the cursor to the beginning or end of a recording, but what I want is, when searching for a particular passage in a long piece of music, to be able to move the cursor to a place other than the beginning or end.
There’s several ways you can do this.
The easiest way to jump to a specific point while playback is stopped, is to zoom out so that you can see where you want to jump to, then click on the audio track at the place that you want to jump to.
If you have a wheel mouse, zooming is very quick and easy with Ctrl+Mouse Wheel.
That’s immensely useful, Steve. The scroll bar underneath the tracks is much too rough and ready, and just using the left and right arrows by themselves only useful for detailed work. Thank you very much, and my apologies for not picking your reply up and thanking you earlier — but I thought I would be notified if a reply arrived, and I wasn’t.
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I am so frustrated. Most of the time I cant use the left arrow or right arrow to move forward or back. I move the arrow, and the numbers in the hours or minutes go white, and I cant get it to move forward or back. It just makes the numbers in the columns white Anybody tell me what to do to get it to work
Mac OS 11.2
If the numbers you’re referring to are in the Selection toolbar it means that keyboard focus is in that toolbar. Just click in any audio track and the arrow keys will move the editing cursor in the audio track.
– Bill
Further to this question, is there a way to fast forward the cursor while selecting (and like OP specified, either forward or backward from cursor position)? Faster than ‘Shift + [l/r] arrow’
In short, No. But when extending the selection with Shift+arrow the amount is extension is dependent on the zoom level. So zoom out to get faster extension.