Returning to Audacity 3 because I cannot recreate my previous workflow

Audacity 4
1

I have now gone back to Audacity 3.

I have been using Audacity for a long time, so I decided to try Audacity 4 with an open mind. I understand that a major new version needs to introduce changes, and I am not against those changes.

My problem is the transition.

After years of working with Audacity 3, I have developed a very specific and familiar workflow. When I moved to Audacity 4, I spent more than an hour trying to configure it so that I could work in the same way I was used to. Unfortunately, I could not reproduce that workflow.

The issue is not that Audacity 4 is necessarily worse, or that the new interface is bad. If I were discovering Audacity for the first time, I might find Audacity 4 perfectly natural.

The problem is that, as an existing user, I am spending more time trying to recover the way I used to work than actually working on my projects. And when the previous behavior cannot be recreated through the available settings, there is no practical way for me to make the transition comfortably.

For that reason, I have decided to return to Audacity 3 for now.

I would really encourage the developers to consider this aspect before the final version. If longtime users could preserve more of their previous workflow, shortcuts, and familiar behaviors while still benefiting from the new features, the transition would be much easier.

I am not asking Audacity 4 to remain unchanged. I just hope there can be a bridge between the old and new ways of working.

I genuinely hope the beta continues to evolve and that the final version takes this kind of feedback into account. I would be happy to try Audacity 4 again in the future if it becomes possible to recreate more of the workflow I have been using for years.

Thank you for developing Audacity, and I hope this feedback helps make the transition easier for existing users.

3 Likes
2

Mind describing the workflow more specifically? As-is, there’s not much action the devs can take on your post

3

Absolutely. I think the main issue is that I am not asking Audacity 4 to look or behave exactly like Audacity 3. What I need is the ability to recreate the workflow I had developed over years of using Audacity 3.

For example, these are some of the things that caused problems for me:

- In Audacity 3, I was accustomed to using the Space bar to start playback, stop it at the current position, and then press Space again to continue from there. I eventually managed to configure this in Audacity 4, but it was not the default behavior I was used to.

- I routinely use the Left and Right arrow keys while listening to move backward and forward through the audio by a short amount, and Shift + Left/Right for longer jumps. In Audacity 4, I could see that short and long seek periods still existed in the Playback settings, but I could not get the arrow keys to behave the way they did in Audacity 3. Instead, the arrows moved the cursor/selection while playback continued.

- I also rely on keeping the playback head visually centered while the waveform moves during playback. I eventually found the option to lock the playback head position, so this one was solvable.

The important point for me is not that Audacity 4 is bad or that it should not change. The problem is that I spent more than an hour trying to configure these basic behaviors so that I could return to a workflow I already knew, and I still could not reproduce all of it.

When you use an application regularly for years, these small behaviors become part of your muscle memory. Changing them is not simply a matter of learning a new interface. If there is no way to configure the new version to behave similarly, the user has to spend a significant amount of time relearning basic operations instead of actually working.

That is ultimately why I went back to Audacity 3.

If there were a way to import or apply an Audacity 3-style keyboard/workflow configuration in Audacity 4, or simply configure these behaviors manually, that would make the transition much easier for longtime users.

I hope this gives you more concrete information about what I mean by the workflow issue.