Suggested fastkey for pausing/stopping

Audacity 4
1

Hi, I’m a fairly simple user, did a lot of cassette capture and cleanup early in year on 3.x, took a long break, and acquainting myself now with 4.0 to do some more. There’s a missing fastkey (keyboard shortcut) that was really useful. It’s literally the 1st key I tried as I explore 4.0! It’s stopping playback AND setting the cursor to the stop point. That must be a very useful function? In 3.0 it was “x”. I don’t see anything recognizable in your keyboard shortcuts list under preferences.

I see in 4.0 that you have “space” key to stop of course, but the playhead immediately goes back to cursor. And you have “shift-space” to stop and leave the playback head at that point. But then manually selecting that point for the new cursor position a little sloppy, at least for me with the touchpad (unless there’s another way?).

If you return that function, it doesn’t have to be “x” like in 3.0. I’d suggest “ctl-shift-space” to stop and set the new cursor position. That would build nicely on the current “shift-space” key sequence.

(Another minor inconvenience I found is that when viewing the keyboard shortcuts under preferences, you can’t explore in the waveform as you’re doing it! It looks like it’s either-or when the preferences are open. It might be nice to spawn that fastkey window in preferences to a floating window that you can keep open while you’re working.)

2

Ok, ignore this one! I found now that the new way is shift-space-space to pause and set the cursor to this new stopped position. Actually cleaver, but it’s taking some intuition to get this all figured out again! (I’d delete this post, but maybe it’s useful for some other transitioners!)

3

By the way, add this “shift-space-space” (as something like “pause and mark new cursor”) to the shortcuts list under preferences so it can be easily found and searched in the list.

(Also suggest a button there to spawn the shortcuts lise to a floating window so you can reference it while in session. You have an export button but that’s too formal and doesn’t catch any new updates. Just spawn it so it’s always the latest.)