Playback starts from beginning of file by default

Audacity 4
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1

I am somewhat new to Audacity (coming from Magix) and very much enjoy the work on version 4; lot’s of great stuff; thank you!

What I find super counterintuitive is that if pressing the “Play” button (or “space”), playback does not start at the current cursor position but at the beginning of a file. In my daily life this is almost never what I want. I found out that I get the desired behaviour by pressing Shift + Space, but in my eyes, this should be exactly the other way round. In the “Shortcuts” preferences section, I was unable to swap this, as both shortcuts (space / shift + space) were assigned to “Play” - another oddness.

Please let me know if I overlooked something. Otherwise, I would like to encourage a change here.

2

Ah, I just saw that I obtain the desired behaviour if I select “click ruler to start playback”. This is fine. I would still vote for making this the default.

3

@samufi

You can click anywhere in the waveform to set the cursor position and then press Play. Audacity will then play from that position.

You can click and drag in the waveform to make a selection and then press Play. Audacity will then play just the selected audio.

Peter.

1 Like
4

This is fair. Thanks for the answer.

I understand that this is the original audacity UX way. I do not understand why a drag / selection operation should be necessary for this, though. (Why do I need to specify an “end of playback” via dragging if I don’t care?) This was counterintuitive to me, and the same may apply to other users. Since playing from the start is a rare use case for me (and I think for most other users as well), this should be reflected in the defaults.