When trying to clip out a segment of a music bed to shorten it, I found I was having trouble as follows:
Set start point with mouse
Set end point with mouse
Play around cut with ‘C’
Adjust start and end points by clicking in the number fields in the footer and adjusting
Play again with C; still not happy
Hit Cmd-[ to zoom to start
Hit Cmd-1 to zoom in to adjust by eye
Expected behavior:
Window zooms in horizontally with start point of selection staying centered.
Observed behavior:
The digit 1 replaces whatever digit was next in the selection position field in the footer, as many times as I hit it.
There is, at that point, no way I can see to pull focus out of that field because everything I try loses my selection – that’s a separate issue (is there a way to mark a fixed named selection range which won’t fall off as I navigate around or click in the track to preview part of it, that I’m missing?).
The “my 1’s go into the text field instead of being interpreted as commands” thing seems like a bug to me; can anyone repro it?
[ billw58 confirms below it’s a known bug; Cmd-F6 will break you out of those fields, presumably without losing your selection range. ]
Audacity doesn’t have Edit Markers like a video editor. The best you can do is set labels at the two edit points. You can move and tune them as needed.
I assume drag-select will snap to the labels, and that’ll be good enough. I’ll give that a try, thanks.
I still gotta think, though, that if my primary report is reproducible, that it’s a bug. Or “there’s no way to get the focus out of those number fields” is, take your pick. :-}
Are you talking about the numerical “Selection and Audio Position Boxes” in the Selection Toolbar?
If you are, you can move out of the “Selection Start” box into the (Selection) “End/Length” box using the Tab key.
The “Tab” key is the standard way to move from one control to the next within a window or panel. On Windows and Linux it is “Shift + Tab” to rotate through the controls in the opposite direction - probably the same on Mac but I don’t use Mac.
Yes, it’s a bug. Tabbing through the selection toolbar controls doesn’t help. You can get trapped in the project rate box and then any Cmd- does nothing. The bug is that Cmd- when in any control in the selection toolbar ignores the Cmd modifier and instead types the number. As you noted, Cmd-[ works, as does Cmd-F and Cmd-E.
The way to get out of the selection toolbar boxes is Cmd-F6. I admit that’s not easy to find in the manual.
Yes, I know that Tab is supposed to move your focus from one control to another, but it didn’t seem to be able to escape that controlset for me. [And, as billw confirms in the next post I hadn’t read yet, it’s a known bug.]
