I’d like to experiment with building an external control surface for doing some simple adjustments during a podcast or interview. Ideally this would mean adding full MIDI control to Audacity but I suspect we’ll have to wait for version 5 for that.
An alternative is to emulate a keyboard with an Arduino or similar and then set up some shortcuts as required. I’ve looked at the shortcut menu and it includes "set record level’ and ‘set playback level’ but these appear to do nothing when I test them. Other shortcuts including my own test additions for rewind in both directions work OK.
What would be helpful would be separate key shortcuts for raising and lowering these levels which could then be driven by rotary encoders via a simple Arduino microcontroller.