I agree that there are workarounds, but that’s my point, Silence Finder is not actually doing what the user wants, or even what users think that it is doing. It is doing something very similar but slightly different. It is these subtle differences that cause the effect to sometimes do the “wrong” thing and so necessitate workarounds.
The start of the problem is in the name “Silence Finder”. The file name is SilenceMarker.ny, which is a subtly different concept from Silence Finder and it is that difference that lies at the root of the problems. The affect attempts to find sounds and then mark the silence preceding the sound, so “Silence Marker” is a description of what the affect tries to achieve. “Silence Finder” is what the effect appears to be doing because the markers will often fall in the gaps between sounds. Another way of looking at the issue is that we have 5 fingers and 4 gaps between those fingers - the gaps are not marked directly, but are marked by by offsetting the position of the fingers.
I think that we get few complaints because, as you say, it is well documented, including workarounds that may be necessary and the issues have only come to light because developing an advanced version required examining the small details of what the effect does. The code in Silence Finder (and Sound Finder) is rather convoluted and it is not easy to work out exactly what it is doing, but when unravelled it is not actually doing what it should be doing or what it implies that it is doing.
With the possible addition of an advanced sound finder I see this as an opportunity to look at the simple version afresh and replace Silence/Sound finder with a new version that does exactly what we want it to do. I’d expect the differences, from a user perspective, between a new version and the current version(s) to be minor, but an improvement on what we currently have.
I think that we are getting to the crux of the matter.
If we define precisely what we want of the “simple” effect then I can write it, but I think that we need to break free in our minds from the legacy of the the current effects.
If we did not have Silence Finder or Silence Marker, then what would be the design specification for this effect?
We want to mark the position a short way before the start of each “song” (bearing in mind that not all music will be “songs”).
We can’t use the term “tracks” because of confusion with Audacity tracks.
We can’t use the term “Silences” because that does not mark the first “song”.
We can use the term “Sounds”, but initially we have a possible confusion because of the legacy of the current effects.
We can’t call it “Track Splitter” because it does not actually split the track, it just adds labels where we want to split.
My preference at the moment would be “Label Sounds”, which I think describes concisely what we want the effect to do while avoiding confusion with the current effects.
Any better ideas?