Hi all, is there a keyboard shortcut to access the Selection toolbar’s start time drop-down menu?
I’d like to use only the keyboard to jump to a specific time. If I can access the start-time drop-down with just the keyboard, I could then enter a time and hit the space bar to jump to it.
Thanks!
(I’m on Mac OSX 10.13.3 and Audacity 2.2.0.)
No, but you can set the selection start / cursor position by pressing the “[” key (while stopped), then enter the time. (use the “]” key for the end of the selection)
For a full list of available shortcuts, see: Commands and Keyboard Shortcut Reference - Audacity Manual
Very helpful. I used this to create a “Rube Goldberg” machine for setting the playhead time, using Keyboard Maestro.
Two Keyboard macros do the job pretty well.
The macro “Store Cursor, Export labels”
creates a text file with the labels.
Open it up, and you may see a label to navigate to. Copy the timestamp to clipboard.
The macro “-Set Left Selection Boundary”
places that timestamp into the playhead time box at the bottom.
It’s WAY more complicated than it should have to be,
because Audicaty “helpfully” positions the focus on the left-most nonzero box.
To type the new timestamp,
you have to start the leftmost number in the correct box, which depends on the number of digits to the left of the decimal.
Argghhh. Thus this crazy stuff.
Here is what the macro does.
Type left bracket (as steve suggests).
Then type lots of zeros to remove stuff there, then re-open, which will position the focus on the right-most box because it’s all zeros now.
Do the same with the right boundary, with “]”.
Then run a shell script to extract the part left of the decimal point.
The macro then pads with zeros on the left of the number.
Then delete the decimal point.
Then “]” and “insert type by typing” the resulting string of digits goes into the Position box.
Click OK.
Now the selection will reach from 0 to the desired timepoint.
This is ridiculous. It works for numbers with 0 1 2 and 3 digits left of the decimal pt.
If you are interested, here are the 2 macros for Keyboard Maestro:
Labels and timestamps