I have tried using Audacity for several years now for voice recording, and I have always given up after a few hours of frustration - until I found out just yesterday that my frustration was largely because of the documentation. Let me share my experience as a newcomer - maybe that’s useful, as most forum participants already know what to find where, and therefore may be “blind” for the things a new user finds irritating.
My key frustration with Audacity, frankly, was the fact that there is no “Record/Stop” button. So you can start recording with the mouse, but when trying to stop it again, you have to look at the screen, fiddle with the mouse, find the stop button, and click it - which is impossible to do “blind” without averting your look from the text you are reading. Next thing is you have to find the place in the text where you need to continue…
While this need to find another button clearly is an act of advanced UI sadism (any idea why a disabled button is better than a button switched to “stop” function?), it can be circumvented easily by using keyboard shortcuts - finding the space bar is much faster than aiming the mouse. However, …
Keyboard shortcuts are not mentioned in the documentation. And it really isn’t easy to find out that you can both stop and replay with the space bar, which is exactly what I was looking for.
So why didn’t I read the documentation before? Well, I tried several times - honestly. it’s impossible, because it is not task focused. The “Tour guide” starts with “Record, play and Edit” - which is exactly where you want to start - but then the first explanation is not on how to record, but on the “Loop” button - completely irrelevant if you are literally trying to record the first 5 sec of your voice on Audacity. And again, no mention of keyboard shortcuts, which can make your life way easier. Or the mention of the “Grabber” - really not interested in reconfiguring my user interface at this stage.
Or the section on shortcuts - “Many buttons and menu commands have pre-defined [keyboard shortcuts] assigned.” Great, but what about listing the 5 - 10 most useful ones?
And the documentation is hard to navigate. You start at the manual home page. “How to use Audacity” takes you to pretty much the same page with the same big box (in even bigger font) on top which you just came from, plus a lot of detail which does not give you any idea about the first steps. Next try - “Tutorials” - first point is “Mixing voice with background music” - OK, I am really not there yet. I suppose any sane person will give up at that point.
I understand, nobody likes writing docs - but for a tool like this, a meaningful, use-case based documentation would really be invaluable.
UPDATE: one thing you have made me realize is that the Stop button in the Transport toolbar does not show its Spacebar shortcut. I will log an issue for that later on Muse’s Github issues log
Actually I do like writing manuals (and some others too on the old Audacity Team, like Steve, Bill and Koz who are also Forum elves on here) I’ve written a fair bit of this one over the years.
I happen to be the current editor of the manual - but please be aware that when Audacity 4 is released with a much-revised user interface the old manual is planned to be deprecated in favor of Muse’s Support site:
Note that some pages/sections that were originally in the manual have already been migrated by Muse to their Support site.
Also be aware that one of the best navigation tools in the manual is the clickable imagemap, the image of the Audacity screen on the front page of the Manual.
This “Amazing Imagemap”, as it is known was cleverly developed some years ago by Bill Wharrie @billw58 (another ex Audacity Team member). I personally, as the editor, find this a totally invaluable tool for navigating the manual.
Actually I realized a few weeks ago that the font size in the How to Use and Tutorial secion was too large - so I fixed that for the upcoming 3.7.4 manual (I can’t edit the already released manuals)
The reason that the in-manual tutorials start with a more-advanced tutorial is that Muse have already moved the “stater-pack” simpler, basic, ones to their Support site
I might move that “Mixing voice with background music” - lower down that list - but for lots of people this is just the thing that they want to do from the get-go (Podcasters for instance).
Frankly, I am astonished that anyone would criticise the Audacity documentation. I think it’s some of the clearest and most detailed I’ve seen of any software package. Added to that there are lots of YouTube videos where people show you how to do stuff. Another similar program I use has NO documentation at all that I could find. Why not write a cheat sheet of your own so you have everything relevant to you in one place? And it will stay with you better because it’s your own words.
Mark B
Peter,
I don’t know if you know how different Audacity 4.0 will be but I’m wondering if there is any mileage in creating an ebook from the current documentation for people that prefer that format. Maybe I could contribute in some way. I used to format ebooks for a publisher in that London and I have software that I used for that purpose. We talked before about how Carla Schroder’s book was useful despite needing an update.
Thoughts?
Mark B
Sorry if I was not clear enough - there is no button no the screen. Once I start recording I have to move the mouse and find the “Stop” button. I cannot stop recording by pressing the mouse button again without moving the mouse.
The keyboard shortcuts are not mentioned in the documentation itself - it only refers to “Press the record button” or "Press Shift and record button, not “press Record ” or “Press Shift-Record ()”. As your point about the space bar shows nicely, Audacity has a user interface which is effectively unusable without keyboard shortcuts. The Record button which cannot be used to stop recording is probably the most obvious example. And a page with all keyboard shortcuts without context is not really helpful for that. At least not for someone who is new to the software, and who learns a software by using it, rather than by reading the manual cover to cover.
The button on the screen is the Stop button in the Transport Toolbar and yes, if you want to use the mouse to stop then you need to move your cursor to that button.
The Mouse bindings (unlike the shortcuts) are not configurable, so you couldn’t configure a mouse gesture to make a Stop.
Oh yes they are .
As I showed you before there is a nav bar entry for the shortcuts page.
And the manual’s front page has a further clear entry:
Are you talking about any particular page (or pages) which does not show/mention shortcuts when it should?
You may be pleased to know that the work-in-progress under development version 4 of Audacity does precisely that - pressing the record button again while recording is in progress stops the recording (I just tested that on the latest alpha test build of AU4)
the underlying engine is very similar (probably the same AFAICT - but the user interface is different in lots of ways - to the extent that a simple upgrade of the 3.7 manual would likely be impossible.
This, for example is what it looks like right now (using last night’s nightly build for Windows):
a) I am only the caretaker editor (a janitor caretaker as it heads towards the oblivion of deprecation)
b) I am not a Muse employee, I used to be a member of the old Audacity Team before Muse took over the project. I just work her still as a pro bono volunteer
c) Muse own all the rights to the project, including the documentation and in particular the manual - so it is really Muse that you would need to approach with such an idea. The best person to approach there would either be Martin Keary (Tantacrul) or Leo @LWinterberg
Given that the GUI is so different I’m not sure that such an archived ebook would retain value long t term - and note that old versions of the manual can always (for now a least) can be downloaded from the old Audacity versions site:
For me, the things that I would most miss are some tutorials that have not (not yet anyway) been migrated to the Muse Support site and those are the ones on the digitization of LPs, tapes and Shellac 78s. That is where I came in to Audacity and I wrote much of those tutorials (based on my own workflows) and I still find myself regularly referring Forum users to those tutorials.
Oh and thanks for your earlier note of support for the Audacity documentation - much appreciated
Only the alpha or pre-alpha test builds of Audacity 4 get changed daily (weekdays anyway).
Audacity 3.7.x only gets updated rarely these days - it is really in maintenance mode only - and there’s not actually much maintenance actually happening - almost all of Muse’s efforts are focused on Audacity 4
But I do think it would be hard to keep-up a book.