timeline on track

I am using Windows 10 Pro…Audacity 2.3.2…64 bit.
This is a minor issue but I would like to fix it.
In the past whenever I started Audacity the initial track defaulted at 12 seconds as I remember… now it starts at 18…I know this is meaningless but I would prefer the track to default at 10 seconds if possible.
Can anyone help with this?
Thanks

anyone ?

I don’t understand what you mean by “the initial track defaulted at 12 seconds”.

When I start Audacity there is an Audacity window…in the main part of the window is the space were I record tracks…above there are a series of #s that count the seconds on the track…it always defaults to 18 seconds when I open Audacity…it used to do that at 12 sec but it changed…I`d like to set it to 10

Are you opening Audacity full screen, or windowed?

Screenshot (2).jpg
this what I see…it is a window but it covers the entire screen

the timeline begins at -1 and ends at 18

The number of seconds visible when Audacity is first opened depends on the window size and screen resolution.
The thing that confuses me most, is why does it matter if Audacity shows 18 seconds rather than 12 seconds?

I just looked online and set the program to open full screen which appears exactly the same…I can reduce the size of the window manually but when I expand it to full size the timeline goes back to 18 seconds…I am confused as to why it happened…I have been using this program for many years and have never seen it happen
There is no particular reason why I want to do this I just do…Im trying to set this track to 10 because its easier for me to visual what’s going on looking at groups of 10

You could create a Macro to adjust the amount of time shown to anything you want, and assign a keyboard shortcut to the Macro. Then, when you open Audacity, you would just need to press that shortcut key to get the zoom that you want.

The commands that you need in the Macro are:

SelectTime:End="10" RelativeTo="ProjectStart" Start="0"
ZoomSel:
SelectNone:

Can you explain to me what a Macro is and how to use it ?

The documentation is here: Macros - Audacity Manual

Basically, an Audacity Macro allows you to create a list of Audacity commands. When you run the Macro, each of the commands run in turn (top to bottom of the list). A Macro may be applied to the current project (as in this case), or applied to selection of audio files (batch processing).

In this case, you will be applying the Macro to the current Audacity project. For convenience, you can set a keyboard shortcut to the Macro, so that the Macro runs when you press a key, or key combination. For example, you could set the key “F9” to run this Macro.

SelectTime:End="10" RelativeTo="ProjectStart" Start="0"
ZoomSel:
SelectNone:

The first command selects the first 10 seconds.
The second line zooms to fit the selection.
The final line removes the selection (puts the project back to the default state of no selection).

thank you