I’m having a problem navigating what I guess is new in Audacity. Waveform db has been mentioned but I do not see it
in the View tab-- only Zoom.
In older editons I could see a broad wave form displayed vertically. Now all there is is a spaghetti thin strip.
I am a casual usser and not regular audio engineer. Please give the step swithin the program to view a waveform
so as to be able to see stops and starts etc.
I have problems with digital markers to begin and end as well. Please do do not redirect me to manual page. Assume I did that and failed.
A long way to go yet to get familiar with Wavedb™ but I found the right screen area to open the
dialog or submenu. Quite frankly I’ve never messed with any of the elements of the main screen. I
normally just want to fade something out or in for video.
But this reminds me:
Is there simple guide in steps to enter the times to start a fade out and go to the end? I’m aware of selecting effects.
I seem to have all sorts of problem with the numeric area.
So for that: Find end of file (button at top)
Go back a few seconds on the numeric counters
(I think there’s some ‘select’ control key needed here)
Select > Effect > Fadeout
Save and done.
The problem I was having with this wave form business is seeing the highlighted area at the end of file
which is only a couple seconds.
Well now I did it. I went to look for the same option on the program on another PC.
I clicked an “x” extreme left of screen and now I have a grey box to look at and can’t get out of it.
No dialogs appear to undo.
At this point if I weren’t asking a lot of questions I’d reinstall the program just to avoid any further irritation.
“x” in a box by itself usually means close or delete. In this case, I suspect you deleted the track. In Windows, you should be able to bring it back with Edit > Undo (Alt-E,U) or just Ctrl-Z.
OK, so you’ve found the “end of file” button (Cursor to Track End). So ahead and click it now.
You can now zoom in (at the end of the track) by clicking on the icon that looks like a magnifying glass with a + sign in it (frequently near the top right of the screen). If you hover over it, it says Zoom in. So click this until you only have the final three or four seconds of audio displayed on the screen. (Zoom out if you go too far).
Hover the mouse pointer near the end of the track (near in the middle of the screen) until a yellow line “magically” appears.
Press down the left button on the mouse and “drag” the mouse left until you have highlighted your few seconds. Then release the left mouse button.
On the frustrations I’ve got the finger from the program. Probably enough said about that.
How did this ever get so complicated? The Control + Click to get the wave form showed a magnifying glss. Pretty soon I had even finer spaghetti as an image than before. In other words, the command had seemingly only one direction the wrong way.
I’m still going to try and use magnify to expand the end.
So go to end, Finger from end backward then… how to highlight when the selection does one of it’s color changes?
For comaprison I have had no luck learning Goldwave either. And I’ve owned that for a long time-- more time
than I’ll mention.
Continuing with this I RTFM’ed a bit this afternoon. It is well laid out. As a total civilian it is still fascinating to me and has been since the old Goldwave days (I think that’s all there was back then.) But it’s still a lot of keystrokes to follow and make sense out of. I just don’t retain enough of it and it’s always been that way. That and often I don’t see the result shown or intended.
Yes, I believe in your attachment, you are talking about the time toolbar. It simply marks the position of the cursor, so you know exactly where you are. See here: Time Toolbar - Audacity Manual
No, no one has “dropped” any of your frames.
The frames, or dropped frames or non-dropped frames as they are called are simply convenient numbering systems used by various standards. Some of these standards date back to changes made for color TV seventy? years ago. For more information about some of these subtleties see here: What is the difference between drop frame and non-drop frame timecode? | Bodenzord
For me, I just use the drop down arrow supplied and specify hh:mm:ss+milliseconds. Then it will use the same numbering system as your start and stop time selection bars.
What it did was changed my method. Sometimes I just don’t see what’s needed. I have very few short tracks
like pieces of music. But I got one of those and the default then displays a recognizable wave form properly, not like the spaghetti-thin dispay of a 2 hr 50 min play audio.
On the selection process. Yes I can use the finger, see the yellow line and drag which gives a screen highlight in white.
Then I can play it at least. What is needed is to add the magnification to the end of the much longer audio piece as we’ve described for a fade out.
F1=selection tool
skip to track end
zoom in (4 times)
cursor to track end
(note yellow line(not yellow in video)
drag cursor back 3 seconds
Effect > Fade Out (menu not visible in video)
I hope this helps.
To answer the last question: no not rhetorical or a joke. I do not see ay highlights in for example this misspellling. Thre e ‘els’ nothing happens. Is there a default to set which I have not found? I know your layout is widely used for the forum, but no, I do not see any underscores.
Today I was reading the manual pages on tracks and navigation. Really too much to hold in my
head for all the keystroke combinations. I’m mostly doing only fading in or fading out.
At the end of the file (both tracks etc) I want to grab the last three seconds (as described in the
manual) with the finger, (drag finger backwards) take that highlighted area and magnify so I can
see the last bit and select that and go to Effects > fade out > test play audio and
save the file.
What are the steps for that through the maze of key commands?
(On that finger stuff I just recalled the other problem-- that of overshooting the end
and not knowing how to get back since the finger will push the end to a new marker.)
You have to imaging a stranger seeing all this stuff and not knowing what’s going on.
Alternatively-
Can I do the same procedure with the track command line in numbers?
What is the method for that in steps?
I am going to practice this a bit just from what I read, but even in that there were distractions
to go to other manual areas. Perhaps if the manual had sections on doing thise specific common
operations. I did not see that.
If you are referring to the forum’s message composing box, spell check may be provided by the web browser that is being used.
I’m using Firefox.
If I type misspellling , the Firefox spell checker underlines it in red, as shown in this screenshot:
