I really want to use audacity 4 but this long term project I’m working on requires me to close individual tracks very frequently and the lack of an (x) button on individual tracks is a necessity. It would be amazing if this feature could return from the previous version of audacity!
2 Likes
Mind describing your workflow a bit more?
FWIW: We made the decision to not have a permanent “delete track” button because we anticipated that other features would lower the amount of tracks needing to be created and subsequently deleted (eg drag’n’drop placing clips where your cursor is, as opposed to always putting it in a new track).
Thanks for the reply and the clarity!
I’ll try to be clear at describing this:
During an episode I need to record both narrator and character dialogue separately. Each scene generally has one track of narration and one track of character dialogue. Each episode has several scenes.
After recording each episode, I need to save and export each individual track as separate files with their own naming conventions.
Until this point I basically create copies of the full .aup, rename them to whatever they need to be named and then open them all, deleting the tracks I don’t need. The “delete track” button made the process extremely easy and quick to do this.
Does this make sense? Maybe there is a better way…
Honestly I think that may have been a mistake. Drag-and-drop features don’t change anything when importing multiple audio files into a project still creates a separate track for each one, making it likely some pruning will be needed later on. That’s something I’ve always done in Audacity, and expect I’ll still regularly do in Audacity 4.
There’s the track context menu “Delete”, sure, but that’s pretty inconvenient. And the default shortcuts, at least, don’t seem to provide a readily available keyboard equivalent. (Though perhaps I just overlooked it, still finding my way around.)
I notice that the History dock also doesn’t have a close button — “Close” is hidden inside its three-dots menu, with the only other option being either “Dock” or “Undock”, as appropriate. I think that may be an even bigger mistake. Viewing history is likely to be a transient thing, I doubt many people will want it open permanently taking up space in the interface. Undocking is just a matter of dragging the panel, but telling it to go away entirely — likely to be the more common action — requires delving into either the panel or main menu?
(I also notice that the View > Show ____ entries in the main menu don’t follow the Qt norm of changing their text to “Hide ____” when a given element is showing, which makes using those main menu entries as visibility toggles less intuitive.)
2 Likes
That might be worth raising on Github.
It’s been reported. Multiple times.