Hi! I’ve just installed the latest update and, to my surprise, the option to rejoin a split track just by simply clicking the split line between the two parts (when the cursor changes to a pointing arrow) has disappeared… Now, the only way to do that is by selecting the split and rejoining it with Ctrl+J. I think that is a step back and a slower way to do it…
It used to frustrate me no end when I wanted to click to put the editing cursor at a clip split point, only to have the clips joined.
I’d support a key-modifier (option/alt?) plus click to join the clips.
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How about allowing click anywhere in the tracks window to set the cursor position so that you don’t need to click on the track?
Personally I never found it a problem:
- To select an entire clip, just double click on the clip
- To select up to a clip boundary, click at the start position and drag to the clip boundary.
- To select from a clip boundary, click at the end position and drag to the clip boundary.
While I appreciate that some users may find “click to join” annoying, I don’t see any justification for taking this feature away from the rest of us. It could quite easily have been made into a Preference option.
On the other hand, the edge of clips was becoming rather overloaded with multiple disparate features with the addition of non-destructive trimming and Time-stretch (neither of which I need or use).
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I’m 100% with Bill on this
Peter
A strong argument for making it a preference.
If you read again my message, you will see that I’m not asking to remove the option of rejoining splits with the combination of Ctrl+J. I’m just asking to restore a function that we could use (and I definitely used a lot) on the previous versions of Audacity and now it has been removed.
Berenguer, I don’t think we’re suggesting the removal of CTRL+J to join clips.
The preference would say which is the “bare” click and which is the “click-with-modifier”.
The cursor should also change to reflect the preference. It used to change to the arrow when a click would cause a join.
This is the best of both worlds. Each user decides which is their preferred “bare click”, but can get the alternate behaviour with a modifier key when they need it.
Just to dampen expectations a bit – preferences have a cost on their own. There’s both a development cost to maintain each preference as features related to it get changed or added, and a cognitive cost to the user as each preference added makes it increasingly difficult to find any individual preference.
As steve noted, the clip edges got overloaded with new features we’ve added, and for Audacity 4, we’ll be making clips first-class citizens of the app, which you can multi-select, group, apply effects on (in the case of speed and pitch, even non-destrructively!), color and move together (including overlapping other clips). We’re designing Audacity such that working with clips as clips is the preferred way to manipulate your audio.
Incidentally, older Audacity versions are designed in a way that makes a one-clip-per-track the preferred way to manipulate your audio. In that environment, if you think of clips as temporary edits you’re moving around before merging everything back together, the line made perfect sense. So I’d wager you’d get the nicest experience with the merge line in 3.0.5 or 2.4.2, and that anything we’re doing for Audacity 3.x and 4.x is useless to you.
Just curious. Playback of a track with several clips sounds the same as with one clip, correct? Would like to know why this is important as I am new to Audacity.
@BetaFord, I work with mostly spoken word, but having clips joined would make it easier to move everything and not mess up syncing/pacing. However, this could also be done by locking down entire tracks, so everything moves when an edit is made (forgot what the official name of this is).
Personally, I like the “J for join” option, but I’m curious to see the other option being discussed here.
Sorry slow on reply. Thanks David for your insight. Makes sense with the syncing.