I’m using latest Audacity 3.1.3 on Windows 8.1. For some reason, the mousewheel alone is not bound to any action whatsoever. To horizonally scroll the waveform, the user needs to press and hold Shift while using the mousewheel. Surely I’m not the first one asking this, but I prefer not to revive a decades-old topic.
Kindly let me know if as 2022 there’s some option whatsoever to remove the Shift requirement and use mousewheel alone (without editing the source code and re-compiling my own custom version)
Also, scrolling with the right-click would be great, like I did in some ancient program like GoldWave (in 2002) or Creative WaveStudio (in 1997). For some reason Audacity thinks its better to simply ignore the right click and drag function and do nothing.
The mouse wheel alone is bound to vertical scrolling (just like in most web browsers, word processors, text editors and so on.
Also, just like a short page in a web browser or document editor will not scroll (because it is entirely visible without scrolling), the same is true in Audacity - if you only have a few tracks that fit entirely on screen, then scrolling will not occur.
If I recall correctly, GoldWave was not a multi-track audio editor, hence no need for vertical scrolling.
Perhaps the better solution (and certainly has been requested many times), would be customisable mouse bindings (in addition to the customisable key bindings that Audacity already have). Obviously that would be more work for the developers than just shuffling the default key bindings around, but it would add value in a way that Audacity users have requested.
I wouldn’t want to make middle-click dragging bindable, or any of the right/left click interactions as they have a very clearly defined purpose across virtually all software. However, if you have more than those standard left/right + scroll wheel buttons on your mouse, the excess buttons should just be bindable like normal keys, yes.
I agree that allowing standard mouse actions customisable could get very messy for very little gain.
So to answer the original question directly, the standard behaviour of mouse wheel alone is vertical scrolling, and this is intentionally not customisable?
Yes that could be a “nice to have” (but probably quite a low priority enhancement). I think WxWidgets supports up to 5 mouse buttons, and Qt probably supports more, though I’d not be surprised if there are non-standard implementations beyond the common “left, right, middle, aux1, aux2”.
I have to second the request. Every editor known to me behaves like requested here. Every edit I ever made — or better: every edit I wanted to do with Audacity has one, rarely two tracks, so I never needed to scroll vertically. And when I use a commercial editor with many tracks I also have to scroll horizontally way more often than vertically.
I do have respect for making products differently but I can not understand why not letting the user configure the product the way it serves him most.
This tiny extra effort — pressing the shift key for every scrolling — makes me now spending money for WaveLab.
