I use Audacity for cleaning up old recordings of speech for transcription and translation. I have to listen to short pieces repeatedly, so I use looping all the time. My Audacity recently updated to 3.7.7 and I could no longer use shift+space for looping a selection. I could find no way to set up shortcuts to do that. Now looping is complicated and time-wasting. I went back and reinstalled version 3.0.5, where shift+space loops the selection. But now I miss some of the effects that are available on 3.7.7. Please make shift+space looping available in future versions.
The change you’re experiencing is due to a significant “Looping Refactoring” that occurred in Audacity 3.1.0 and has carried forward into 3.7.7. In older versions like 3.0.5, Shift + Space was a hardcoded shortcut for “Loop Play.” In the newer versions, Audacity introduced a dedicated Loop Button and a Loop Range in the timeline, which changed how the software handles these commands.