Playback: “The Play button Clicking Play plays from the cursor point to the end of the project, or from the start of the selection region to the end of that region.”
This works correctly, until it doesn’t. After working on a project for a while*, Audacity continues playing past the end of the selected audio. This is true whether actually drawing a selection, or double-clicking to select a clip. Playback starts at the beginning of the selection, but does not stop at the end.
Same project, same “after a while”: Select some audio and bring up a VST effect, then hit the effect’s “Play” button. Playback starts from 0:00, ignoring the selected audio’s start time. Applying the effect does the right thing, but using “Play” to preview the effect does not.
Exiting and restarting Audacity returned to the expected behavior for both conditions… so it’s hard for me to duplicate.
I seem to recall that there was a bug logged on GitHub for this - and I further seem to recall that that bug got fixed, possibly for the upcoming 3.2.0
I’ll try to find it on GitHub (but locating stuff there is harder that when Bugzilla was being used for bug-tracking)
BUT there is an “intentional” use case where Audacity WILL play beyond the end of a selection and that is when
a) you have a loop region beyond (to the right of) you selection (play region).
b) and the Loop button is down (showing that loop play is “active” - primed really)
In this case pressing Play will start playing at the 10 second mark and will proceed to the end of the loop region at 20-25 seconds.
When it reaches the 25 second mark it returns to 20 seconds and loops from 20-25 seconds until you tell it to stop.
The other slightly odd Loop play use case is that if you have a Loop region and looping active (Loop button down) and place your cursor to the right of the loop region and press play then Audacity will NOT loop but will instead play from that cursor position to the end of the track/project.
I find both these looping behaviors somewhat odd - and I raised this with the Muse designers when they were developing new-looping but they insisted they wanted it to be this way IIRC they told me that Reaper behaves this way.
The Loop button is effectively a state change for the Play button, it doesn’t actually make loop play start - and the Play button no longer shows its old looping variant icon that we had in older versions of Audacity (which you got when you pressed Shift+Play)
If I was designing this I would have made the Loop button a proper Loop-play button that started loop play (and not a Play button state change) if a loop region was present - and maybe loop the whole project if no loop region is present.[/i]
Thanks for working on this! This was definitely not related to loop settings… although, come to think of it, I was struggling with that new interface, too, and being annoyed by the lack of a one-time Quick-Play Region (I don’t want to loop, I just want to play a region once)! Anyway, I’m quite sure I’d cleared any looping regions, and never touched the Loop On/Off button.
And I definitely agree with you on the behavior and design points you raised. Here’s hoping for improvements…
