Irritating and potentially useless feature ruining my projec

Visited the lovely-lovely user manual and help manual, for no answer, context or abbreviation of this issue or feature.
The issue is the timeline length. I am editing a 4 minutes track. What does the timeline decide to do? Well now (quite the doosy) I can select up to 35 Minutes of nonexistent grey space, making the existing audio that actually matters extremely difficult to edit or accurately-select whatsoever.

I spam clicked while holding crazy amounts of keys, scrolls the bar, tried everything from shift clicking/scrolling to even licking my finger and pointing it at the sun for a solution but I can’t find any rational reason for this to occur or even be used. Why do I need a 30 minute timeline when my audio is only 4 minutes collectively? What actual, reasonable use does this incur?

Here’s an example of my issue:

http://prntscr.com/dzz99g

What’s wrong with that?

I doubt that will help. Did you try clicking the << Rewind button?

Which version of Audacity are you using? (Look in “Help > About Audacity”)

http://prntscr.com/dzzxpr

I need the timeline to be exact of my project. You see how it goes on to 21 minutes? Why, lol?
It wasn’t like this before and I apologize for my passive aggressiveness but I have a mean deadline to meet and I can’t for the love of me simply edit section of audio with this. All the audio is essentially squeezed together tight as hell.

Please do the following:

  1. Look in “Help > About Audacity” and tell me which version of Audacity you have.
  2. Press Ctrl+A (select all), then Ctrl+F (Zoom to fit), then Ctrl+Shift+F (Fit vertically), then take a screen shot and post it.

From my reading of Kayreme’s post - once they get to the Ctrl+A then Ctrl+F their problem should be solved (unlesss there is project data beyond the 4 and and half minutes)

Kayreme, please see this page on the Manual on zooming: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/zooming.html

WC