Hi,
I have Win 10 and am running Audacity 2.4.1. I was messing with my preferences after I did a re-install and noticed that if I change the Meter dB Range in preferences, the scale in the audio tracks don’t change unless I restart Audacity. I tried it 3-4 times with different dB settings and always had to restart for the change to take effect.
Not a big deal, just wondering if it’s me or a bug.
Thanks,
Mike
I just tested on W10 with 2.4.1 and the latest alpha test build I have for 2.4.2 and I cannot reproduce this.
My meter ranges change immediately I hit the OK in Preferences.
Peter.
Mine changes right away on multiple machines.
after I did a re-install
Why did you do a re-install? Did you delete the Audacity configuration files? If you didn’t, you didn’t get a fresh Audacity. You got hang-over settings from the old one.
Koz
Koz,
I re-installed and replaced the preferences on install - so I think I got a fully updated version.
The reason I re-installed was that I was having problems with the labels and found that, after the re-install and turning on preferences one-by-one, that the label problem was related to “Retain labels if selection snaps to a label” - that problem has been noted and fixed in 2.4.2 I believe. But as I was replacing my preferences after the re-install, I noticed the Meter dB problem. I’ll wait till the release of 2.4.2 to check it again as it’s not a big issue.
Thanks,
Mike
Hi Peter and Koz,
So I did an uninstall and a fresh install of 2.4.1 on my Win7 Pro Laptop at work. I opened an audio file and right clicked in the vertical scale bar to change to dB display. See image:

Then I opened Preferences and changed the Meter dB Range to -84:

Then after clicking OK, here is what I see:

After closing Audacity, starting it up again, loading the original Audio file, and changing to dB scale, this is what I see:

This same thing is happening both at home and at work. But at work it was a fresh install - so I’m not sure what else I should be looking for.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Mike
Hi Mike,
AH now I see why we were at cross purposes - thanks for those steps to reproduce and illustrations.
I was looking at the meter toolbars anf thay change ass soon as you OK the preference change.
Testing on 2.4.1 and 2.4.2 latest alpha I see what you see with the Vertical Scale not updating until you relaunch Audacity.
This is an inconsistency (and we don’t like inconsistency in Audacity) so I’m going to log this as a bug. I’ll do some regression testing first to see if it is a regression. Turns out this is a regression on 2.1.1
I looked at the Manual and I see no indication of this behavior
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/interface_preferences.html#Display
But it does indicate that the Vertical Scale and the meters can have independently scaled ranges.
Peter.
Logged as P2 regression bug #2480
https://bugzilla.audacityteam.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2480
Vertical Scale dB does not update when Meter range is changed in Prefs
Good catch Mike 
Peter.