Since re installing Audacity 2 on my new PC, the cursor will only position itself exactly on each second, meaning that selections can only be made between a series of whole seconds. How can I re set the cursor to position in any spot? Thanks.
De-select (untick) “Snap To” in bottom left corner of the window.
FAO of Gale, Steve and co.
I wonder if some of the problems with “Snap To” are occasioned by users who, not being aware of the zoom in/out capability, use the Selection Start field to specify where they would like to be positioned, and then select “Snap To” thinking that the cursor will jump to that position? What they do not realise is that, from that point on, they are stuck with a cursor that will only “snap to” whatever units of measure was set in the Selection Start field.
I have tried putting myself in the mindset of a user who has just installed Audacity, and who hasn’t bothered to read any of the documentation (that’s probably a fairly typical new user). I think I might well believe that the “Snap To” box works as I have just suggested. Of course, there is now the Tooltip when the mouse hovers over the field label; but that does not make it clear that the box sets the granularity at which the cursor can be positioned. It simply confirms that the snap to will be to a particular granularity. Perhaps the box should be moved to the right of these three fields, so that the visual link between it and the Selection Start field is broken. Further, perhaps the label, or more likely the Tooltip, should be presented as: Snap To the unit of measure (not value) used in the fields to the left.
I have been of the opinion for a long time that this tool breaks far more often than simply a software glitch. We leap to fix it, but we never ask, “Did you turn on [Snap To] while you were learning Audacity or learning to edit?”
“What did you think it did?”
Koz
An interesting theory (and as good as any other that I’ve heard.)
I used to ask that every time but I never received an answer so eventually gave up asking.
(I tell a lie… out of the dozens of times that I asked, I did once get a response which was that it was on by default.)
The tool tip does seem to have made an improvement as the issue comes up less often now than it used to.
That has been considered but the problem is that at the default window size, the Snap To selection will be hidden if the time format is changed to one of the longer formats (such as hh:mm:ss + samples). This could be potentially a lot worse because the box could be selected and then hidden while still selected.
Tool names and Tool Tips need to be fairly brief, but I like the addition of the word “Units”. I’ll put forward that suggestion to the developers/QA.
Done.