You know that tiny square slider in the meters that changes the volume?
Make it black—or anything but clear.
Koz
1 Like
jademan
September 19, 2023, 8:32pm
2
Excellent suggestion. A lot of forum users seem to bump that thing and can’t understand it when they can’t hear their audio.
Of course, perhaps it also needs some kind of a visual “homing” clue.
jademan:
… also needs …
We should be careful not to enter a Friedel Cycle.
Make the slider black and easier to see, and also design a “Homing Clue” to make it easier for the user to discern the operational goal, and while we’re in there touch up the meter displays a bit, and add a BBC-PPM option, and that’s too much work so we won’t do anything.
That’s a fully qualified cycle.
Koz
I logged this enhancement reuest almost a year ago:
opened 03:31PM - 19 Oct 22 UTC
closed 01:47PM - 02 Jun 23 UTC
Enhancement Request
P4
Design / UX
feature tweak
### Your idea
Now that the Recording and Playback sliders have been moved to th… e Recording and Playback meter toolbars, in the Light _(default)_ and Classic themes given that the sliders are gray on gray they can be difficult to spot, making them a poor visual cue.
This is less of an issue on the dark and High Contrast themes where they are light gray on dark gray or black respectively.
My suggestion is that the borders of the Recording and Playback meters be colored red and green respectively (to color-code with the Record and Play button icons:
**Meter Toolbars**

Note that I also moved the sliders ever so slightly leftwards away from their hard-right default positioning in the meter toolbars, also to give them a little more visibility.
**PAS Toolbar**
Given that the Play-at_speed toolbar is also a playback toolbar then its slider icon should possibly also have the same green border for consistency:

### Problem to be solved
This issue surfaced on the Forum earlier this week.
Plus I ran some _(admittedly not statistically significant)_ tests,comparing older Audacity with its Mixer toolbar to the newer Audacity, with my "Mystery-Shopper" to see if she could easily spot them- she couldn't
### Prior art
Existing 3.2.x

### Additional context
Flagging @Tantacrul and @LWinterberg as thus is a UX/GUI usability issue.
Color-coding for Recording and Playback sliders which can be difficult to spot (in Light and Classic themes) #3827
As you can see from the final post in the thread , Muse will not be fixing this is the current versions of Audacity that use the WXwidgets library - they say there will be a different solution in the Qt version thay ar working on.
Peter.
jademan
September 20, 2023, 11:06am
5
However, don’t tell Tantacrul I like your red and green colors.
Almost all the app meters I’ve ever seen had red & green meters and many also have the yellow.
system
Closed
October 19, 2023, 6:26pm
7
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