Keeping selection

Special Interest Groups Audio Processing
1

It is very hard to make some selections for the first time. Then I often need to zoom in and repair it. Still I’m unable to play the sound around the selection because the selection disappears. The selection could stay there while the playback would stop when it reaches the boundary of the selection.

2

  1. Use Ctrl+mouse wheel for fast zoom in and out.

  2. Make a selection and then position the mouse pointer near to the selection WITHOUT clicking.
    Press the “B” key. Audacity will play the region between the mouse pointer position and the closest edge of the selection.

  3. Make a selection and press the “C” key. Audacity will play a preview of the audio that will remain after “Cutting” out the selection - it plays a bit before the selection, then continues after the selection.

3

Thanks. Would be great to insert these possibilities into menu. Still I would prefer to make selection not disappearing.

4

Making the “B” key operation into a menu item wouldn’t work because you need to hover your mouse pointer over the waveform while pressing the key. Pressing “C” is faster than selecting a menu item.

There are a couple of ways of retaining a selection once it is made:

  1. Once you have the selection, press CTRL + B (Tracks > Add label at selection) and typing a name for the label. You can then get the selection back at any time by clicking in the label and pressing the enter key.
  2. Press CTRL + I (Edit > Split) which creates a clip from the selection. You can then get the selection back at any time by double-clicking anywhere inside the clip. You can remove the clip lines when you no longer need them by clicking on the split lines while the pointer is a NE-pointing arrow.

– Bill

5

Menu is slow, but still faster than searching in documentation. Combination of selection and splitting works well, still needs one more operation when I need to change the selection. Labels work as well but I was unable to delete current label without affecting other labels or tracks. Maybe labels can have own menu list.

6

To delete a label leaving everything else untouched, click in the label then delete all the label text, then press delete one more time and the label is gone.

– Bill