Some thoughts and bugs trying 4.0 Alpha 2

Audacity 4
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1

Just used the Alpha 2 (Audacity-4.0.0.253031629.f3e3e3b.-x86_64) to edited a 10 minutes recording, here are some thoughts.

  1. It no longer auto plays when clicking on timeline top bar, which…I understand, but I want it as an option.
    I constantly re-listen to grab a finer take, and the need for manually stop and play every time, adds up real fast.
  2. When clicking on the item, the ever-so-slightly dragging makes it a tiny area selection, and then the playing gets cut really short.
    I think it’d be reasonable to measure how long the user had been dragging the mouse, and set a threshold to determine if it’s intended to do an area selection.
  3. The input meter preview is always on even when muted, which is just annoying. I prefer the Reaper way, which let me set if the track is active.
  4. The Track volume slider…It’s nice that holding shift gives finer control, but a manual number input would still be a lot better. Also, the tip that shows the current value never goes away, even stays on top when browsing other window. (Might be a KDE thing though.)
  5. When I select an area, do a ripple delete, realized it’s not quite right, so undo…The selection is off by one undo step. It’s now selecting the previous selection, and if I want the last selection, I Redo…and it also re-delete the wrong area.
  6. When doing ripple delete, for about 1 frame, the track is empty. It looks like nothing existed in that track for that split moment until it’s done processing.
  7. The Play button is inconsistent. Sometimes it just decided it wants to play from start, sometimes not, both UI button and space. I haven’t figure out a logic behind it.

That’s about it. Just in case, here’s my spec:

Operating System: Bazzite 43
KDE Plasma Version: 6.6.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.25.0
Qt Version: 6.10.3
Kernel Version: 6.17.7-ba29.fc43.x86_64 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 12 × AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6-Core Processor
Memory: 32 GiB of RAM (31.3 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti
Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
Product Name: X570 GAMING X

2

Yeah, that looks like a mix of bugs and not-implemented-yet. @dozzzzer and @mugen2x may find this interesting

3

  1. Logged an enhancement

  2. This is known

  3. When you press mute, indeed, it doesn’t turn the mic metering off. We might want to change that. However, it’s not always on; you can disable it by unchecking this checkbox:

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  4. This is on our list

  5. This has most likely already been fixed. Please check the latest master build to confirm this.

  6. This should have been fixed by now, too.

  7. We have encountered a number of bugs relating to the incorrect start position of playback. I’d say most of these have been fixed by now. However, if you are still experiencing this issue in the current master, please consider logging it on GitHub and try to provide as many details as possible.

4

These sounds nice and promising.

Well I don’t find a nightly build, and I’m too lazy to figure out manual building…I’ll just wait for Alpha 3 and report again then.

5

You can find nightly builds here:

6

>It no longer auto plays when clicking on timeline top bar, which…I understand, but I want it as an option.

Testing on one of the later nightlies it is there but is is now an option that is turned off by default.

Right click on the Timeline to get its context menu and turn on this option

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Peter

7

Just got the nightly and yes,

1 is an option now. (Though I’m not sure if I’d be trying to right click there without instruction.)

3 doesn’t seem to be default to previewing, that also works.

5 and 6 is straight up fixed.

2 is really obvious, so I’m confident it’d be tackled at some point.

3…The current Nightly build is super slow. It takes seconds for any right-click menu to show, and the tip lags and stutter…But it does disappear now.

If I hit record before creating a track, the App crashes instantly, not really a big deal since no content was created anyway.

All in all, I felt resolved. I hope Alpha 3 will be more responsive and usable.