If Audacity can only run in one window at a time, why does it allow multiple windows/instances to be created? Most other applications give a Preference choice for one or many windows.
So that you can have multiple projects open at the same time 
There aren’t many situations where you need to have multiple projects open simultaneously, but way back in the early days of Audacity, someone thought that it could be useful sometimes.
To be clear, there is only ever one instance of Audacity running at a time, but there can be multiple projects open. If there were more than one instance of the program running, there would be a very serious risk of one instance overwriting temporary data from the other instance.
I understand. However, I don’t want multiple projects concurrently open, ever. Please add an option to prevent opening multiple projects concurrently. Having it as an option satisfies the few who need that feature. Please make ONE WINDOW the default.
Thank you.
There is an option already - don’t open multiple windows if you don’t want multiple windows open.
I’m guessing that there’s some underlying problem that you are not telling us.
Okay, I guess the underlying problem is that clicking New to start over leaves behind the old window as a “project” even if you did nothing useful in it. Unlike GoldWave, you can’t press the Delete key to delete the current waveform. So I really want a new Preference to never open more than one window/instance, just like most other apps (okay, you want an example? IrfanView, a popular image viewing program, has such an option). Multiple windows confuse me.
“File menu > Close (Ctrl+W)” to close the current project. If you close the last, or only project window, then a new, empty project window will open.
To quit Audacity altogether, “File menu > Exit (Ctrl+Q)”.
To delete a track, click on the [X] in the top left corner of the track (or select the track, then “Tracks menu > Remove Tracks”).
Thank you. Ctrl+W is a dandy workaround.