How to loop play?

Feedback and Discussion Forum
1

I’ve recently upgraded Audacity from an earlier version. (I’m extremely pleased with the improvements to the interface, thank you!)

But I’m quite taken aback that there seems to be no way to “loop play”.

I’m sure I can’t be the only sound editor who regularly plays the selection looped. (By simply hitting the “Loop Play” key instead of hitting space).

This feature is now much harder to use because every time I make a tiny adjustment to my selection, I have to hit “Set loop to selection”, then hit space to play, then turn loop off after - that’s 3 keys for something which I could previously do with 1 key!

Please would you consider adding a control to simply “Play looped”? (To play the selection looped.) This is so much simpler to use than having to worry about where the start and end points are, or whether looping is turned on or off. It’s just one simple key that plays your selection as a loop.

This is such an important issue to me that I very well might have to revert to an earlier version. Because I’m so used to being able to loop the selection with a single key.

2

I don’t use looping in my editing, but I feel your pain.

You could possibly make it less painful by using Preferences > Shortcuts to assign unmodified keys to the main looping commands.

If you are a right-handed mouse user, you could, for example

  • assign A to “enable loop play”
  • assign S to “set loop to selection”
  • assign D to “clear loop”

Note that you can tell whether loop play is on or off by the state of the loop play button.

Not as simple as hitting SHIFT+space to loop play a selection, I admit, but perhaps a reasonable work-around.

Meanwhile, to really get the attention of the developers, head over to the Audacity GitHub

create a free account, create a new “Issue”, make it an “Enhancement” and make your case to bring back simple loop play of a selection.

3

Thanks, billw. I’m a heavy keyboard shortcut user and have already assigned keyboard shortcuts for everything, but it’s still SO much more cumbersome than it used to be. I used to just hit one key to loop the selection. Now it’s three.

4

I was just poking around in Github and found that, when the loop region is set to the selection, looping is enabled automatically. So that removes one keystroke. You still have to Set Loop to Selection after every change in selection, and you have to turn looping off when you don’t want it.

I don’t disagree with you that the old functionality (one keystroke to loop the selection, and no looping mode) was better in your workflow. I’m just offering a workaround while we wait for the developers to add the old functionality back in. I don’t see any down side to having both looping behaviours. Perhaps it could be a preference to have one or the other, or perhaps both could be available at the same time. As one who never uses looping, I can’t understand why one would want the loop region to be different from the selection.

In any case I still encourage you to head over to Github and make your case there.

5

Thanks, BillW, and thanks for supporting me on this.

To clarify, when I said it’s “3 keys instead of 1”, what I meant is if I want to quickly play the selection looped, I first need to hit “Set Loop To Selection”, then hit space to play, then after I need to turn looping off, which is a total of 3 keys to play a loop, where previously it was one.

I’m not a regular GitHub user but I will wander over there, thank you!

6

Here’s the GitHub issue I made, including a new solution which I think will work even better than the original “Loop Play” button: