My 16 biggest annoyances with Audacity (and the solutions)

[LeeJames]

Not the Track Control Panel - but the waveforms themselves can be different colors (from a palette of four)

I’m aware that you can change the color of waveforms, however:

• Currently there are only four color options and they don’t have color swatches, meaning you have to pick them using trial and error.
• The purpose of colors is to quickly find the tracks you’re looking for - but in a large document you’re always going to be looking at the track NAMES, so that’s where the color needs to be.
• Limiting the colors only to the track titles saves the screen becoming full of garish colors
• Assigning colors is something you currently have to manually do. I’m suggesting that colors are automatically assigned, meaning that easier track identification is built into the program
  
  
  

This is where Mac really wins out over Windows.

Well, I guess that’s a matter of opinion. Personally, I cannot stand Apple products and think their mice are the most badly-designed, non-ergonomic mice I’ve ever used.

[waxcylinder]

Based on the above conversation, I’ve developed my re-design of the panel a little further…

Key features:

1. Bigger, clearer title
2. No more amplitude values - (spectrogram mode can still show values)
3. Track drop-down menu now has its own dedicated space
4. Collapse button restyled to more clearly indicate what it does
5. ‘Select’ button removed (unnecessary as you can click anywhere to select)
6. More width for volume/pan sliders to allow more precision
7. • and + symbols replaced with volume symbols
8. (Just an idea:) A button above the pan slider to quickly reset it to center?
9. ‘Mono’ removed as we can see what tracks are mono/stereo
10. ‘48000Hz’ changed to ‘48kHz’
11. Titles are auto-assigned colors, making it easier to quickly find a track by looking for its color

I would say that this is unlikely to happen. One of the developers has long been interested in a redesign of the Track Control Panel - byt it is a LOT more radical than your suggestion.

One thing we are extremely likely to lose is the Select button. QA fought a long hard battle to eventually get that in the TCP. It;s not true that you can click anywhere. You need to click in the “white space” of the TCP and that will select the track. But with small height tracks the “white space” becomes small. awfully easy to nudge the Pan/Gain sliders instead (don’t ask me how I Know - d’oh). In earlier Audacities the collapse/expand button fitted most of the TCP width leaving the little white square to the right of it as the only safe “white space” target. And that’s why we introduced the Select button.

Peter.

[waxcylinder]

This is where Mac really wins out over Windows.

Well, I guess that’s a matter of opinion. Personally, I cannot stand Apple products and think their mice are the most badly-designed, non-ergonomic mice I’ve ever used.

Hahaha

I didn’t say I preferred or even liked Mac products - I am no Macolyte, I’m PC/Windows through and through - but I do have a Macbook for QA bug testing and I do find it’s magic mouse really nice to use.

Peter.

[waxcylinder]

6. Draggable track heights is annoying
Others may disagree, but personally, I find it really irritating how track heights can be resized arbitrarily, so you can end up with all kinds of messy different heights. I like uniformity. I like to feel that the interface is “solid” and “locked” and I’m not going to accidentally resize anything.

Solution: Audacity gets a new option in the prefs: Allow tracks to be manually resized. When this is off, tracks can’t be manually resized, however, if you want to make a track bigger, there is now an new button in the left panel called Expand track - Clicking this button instantly toggles the track between 100% height and 162% height (this is the height I think is most useful).

Personally, I would much prefer if it worked this way. Instead of the uncertainty and inconsistency of draggable track heights, they are all uniform - expanded by clicking one simple button, then the same button toggles them back to standard height.

I do disagree, I use this feature a lot and really like it.

If you don’t, then just be careful of clicking and dragging in the bar between the two channels of a stereo track as you can then resize those independently

Peter.

[waxcylinder]

8. No groups
My documents seem to quickly get very confusing and cluttered, with dozens of tracks, requiring a lot of scrolling up and down past elements I wish I could tidy away into groups.

We’ve long thought about groups and would probably love to do that at some stage. The big problem is that this project is “staffed” by a tiny team of part-time hobbyist volunteers - we just don’t have the required manpower.

Peter.

[waxcylinder]

12. Duplicating irritation
Now this is probably THE biggest thing that annoys me about Audacity - you duplicate a track (or make a new track) and it appears right at the bottom below the very bottom track! This is so frustrating because you’re obviously already working on that track right there where you are, and your duplication obviously relates to the current track in the current location.

Solution: New/duplicate tracks should ALWAYS appear right below the current track. I also think there should be a nice big button somewhere for “Add track below the current one”. Surely this is one of the most fundamental things that users want to do?

Yes, your not the first user to comment on this - and it’s troubled some of us on the Audacity team too. We had some discussions about this in early 2020 and from that I ended up writing a formal proposal in the Audacity Wiki - See: Missing features - Audacity Support

This is another thing we’d love to do, but just don’t have the manpower right now (it’s more likely to come about than Groups, I’m thinking).

Peter.

[waxcylinder]

14. Pasting into blank space
The fourth and final of my ‘top four’ most annoying problems is when you go right down and click on that strip of ‘blank space’ below the bottom track. Hitting Ctrl+V creates a new track and pastes the clipboard into it. This is a handy feature—in theory!

However, in reality, the pasted audio ALWAYS appears right at the beginning of the song! This is almost never what you want, and it means you have to “lose your place” by zooming out or scrolling all the way to the left to find the pasted audio, then scrolling all the way back to where you were working!

Solution: This problem would disappear if Audacity simply allowed you to position the playhead in the blank space below the bottom track. Then, when you hit Ctrl+V, the clipboard contents is pasted right there in position!

OOH, I never knew you could paste into the gray space below all the tracks and thereby get a new tack created -

I’m minded to agree that it would be better if you could position the paste as it is made - I would have it start at the cursor position. I’ll think about writing an ENH enhancement request in our bugtracker for that. Anybody else here think this would be good to have?

Peter.

[waxcylinder]

15. Cut/paste causing ‘ripple’
Sometimes in Audacity you have ‘independent’ potions of audio on the same track, separated by gaps. You can use the Time Shift tool to move these portions left and right, and because they’re not connected to the audio on the right, the audio on the right doesn’t move. There is no ‘ripple’ effect. And this is exactly how it should be.

However, if you perform either cut or paste operations to these ‘independent’ portions of audio, any audio to the right IS ‘rippled’, even though it wasn’t in any way connected.

I find this highly undesirable and unintuitive. I believe that audio to the right should NOT be rippled IF:

• The pasted audio can fit without intersecting any existing audio.
• The right-hand edge of the cut portion intersects NO audio, and falls entirely in a gap.

This is a behavior that is deliberately set “on” by default.

You can turn it “off” by going the Tracks Behaviors preferences and un-checking Editing a clip can move other clips.

See: Tracks Behaviors Preferences - Audacity Manual

Peter.

[steve]

when I’ve copied some audio in the clipboard and want to paste it in to the document. In every single case, I ALWAYS want to paste it directly below the current track at the current playhead position.

Does “Edit menu > Duplicate (Ctrl + D)” do what you want?
or perhaps “Edit menu > Clip Boundaries > Split New”?
(see here for all Edit menu options: Edit Menu - Audacity Manual)

Thank you but No, none of those options work. I’m talking about if I copy audio from another document, come back to my main document and just want to insert the audio below where I’m working, there’s no easy way to do it.

Make a selection where you want to paste. Audacity uses “selections” for nearly everything.

[steve]

OOH, I never knew you could paste into the gray space below all the tracks and thereby get a new tack created

It’s not actually “pasting into the grey space”.

What it is doing:

1. You are trying to paste audio from Audacity’s clip board
2. There is no track selected to paste into
3. so Audacity creates a track to paste into.

If you use any means to deselect all tracks (for example: “Select menu > None”) and then “paste”, you will see the same behaviour.

[ingoogni]

Regarding 12&13
Select the to be copied part and then duplicate the track? ctrl-D. It gives a new track with the selected part copied in.

To me it is obvious that a new track comes below everything else.

When a part on a track is selected it could be useful to just see the the border lines on all other tracks, without high lighting the space between as in selected tracks. Another one, use your screen in vertical/portrait orientation (when using many tracks).

[ingoogni]

I would say that this is unlikely to happen. One of the developers has long been interested in a redesign of the Track Control Panel - byt it is a LOT more radical than your suggestion.

The old channel strip analogy at the bottom of the screen is still what works best I think. It can be compact by using knobs. Now knobs don’t work well on a screen with mouse. You could turn them in a vertical slider onhover or onclick. This would than also be the place to load the channels etc. Then a bunch chunky transport buttons.

Screenshot of my practical clunky recorder. No sliders or knobs as it only records or plays.

[LeeJames]

Thanks for the replies, guys. I wish I had time to reply further but I don’t right now. We all have busy lives!