Is there a setting to enable this?
The waveform amplitude grows or shrinks after using amplication effect or others.
Waveform display unchanged after gain or envelope changes
The waveform amplitude grows or shrinks after using amplication effect or others.
Sorry, what??? Is it unchanged, or does it grow/shrink? Those two statements conflict with each other! Is one of those supposed to be a question? A request?
When I use the envelope tool or the Amplify effect, I see the changes… That seems right to me. 
Sorry ignore the envelope bit, I couldn’t see straight last night - stinking head cold - changing the envelope did change the waveform amplitude.
But changing the gain setting on the left never does - why’s that?
The waveform is a visual representation of the track audio data.
The track gain slider (very usefully) does not alter the audio data. The gain slider simply scales the data during playback and mix/render (it’s like a ‘volume control’ for that track). The big advantage of this is that you can adjust the track gain as often as you like without it causing any loss of sound quality (because it does not alter the audio data at all).
The Amplify effect (like other effects) does change the audio data, and that is shown in the visual waveform.
That’s clear, thanks for the explanation steve.
That’s a tricky one. Very useful on the primary hand (data) but visually less so.
How about also a virtual amplitude representation based on the gain slider scale? 
A couple of years ago someone did start writing new code for Audacity for the purpose of visually representing the audio “as played” (rather than “as per the audio data”, which it does now). The main affect of this is that a mono track, when panned left or right, appears as a stereo track with waveforms in the left/right channels scaled according to the pan position. The code that he wrote is still in the Audacity code base (disabled), but the person that was developing it has not been active in Audacity development for well over a year.
Thanks steve.
Oh well!
Good to know that someone else has worked on it though!
On a slightly different tack but still with visual aids in mind. I see that there are
a few votes for a grid option over the waveform. I’d vote for that - both horizontal and vertical lines, something that could be toggled on and off. What are the chances of this being implemented.
Does or could Audacity coding support unofficial third party “extensions” designed to extend basic functions or GUI appearance (as with some browsers)?
The option to move a track to top or bottom was a very useful addition but I see many longstanding useful looking feature requests that don’t look like being fulfilled, so was wondering what the main priorities of the developers were at present?
I’ve added your vote.
Realistically, it all depends on whether there is someone that has the time, ability and inclination to implement it.
Audacity supports a wide range of “plugins” (VST, LADSPA, Nyquist, AU (Mac only), LV2).
Audacity also has support for “modules”, which are similar to “plugins” but integrate more directly with the Audacity code and can make more radical changes to Audacity’s appearance and abilities. One of the senior developers is currently working on a new “track panel” (the part that shows all of the waveforms etc) as a “module”.
Thanks, that was one of my contributions 
I’m not a C++ developer but I’ve been teaching myself a bit.
The current priority is to release Audacity 2.1, which has a lot of new features (hence the jump from 2.0.6 to 2.1.0).
Thanks again steve, I use - move to top or bottom - all the time.
I didn’t know about modules, is there a list of available ones?
I downloaded the latest nightly build but I’ve not had time to use it aside from seeing that there are different groupings available for the Effects menu and that the attack/decay slider on the new Noise Reducton has been removed as per discussion below. Is it finalised for action?
http://audacity.238276.n2.nabble.com/Re-Noise-reduction-settings-td7567019.html#a7567095
There are currently no officially released modules.
There are two experimental modules that work, but are only available as source code. One of these is “Nyquist Workbench” which provides a front-end for developing Nyquist plugins (this may become available as an official release in the not too distant future). The other is “Mod Script Pipe” which allows Audacity to be controlled remotely from any scripting language that supports named pipes. (so neither of these are really “end user friendly” modules).
I believe that there are also a few third party modules for performing various types of audio analysis, but I don’t know anything else about them and they may not be free open source software.
You mean the new Noise Reduction effect, or Audacity 2.1?
Both are now more or less as they will be in the release version. Currently we are testing and bringing the documentation + translations up to date. No additional changes are anticipated for the 2.1 release (of course after the 2.1 release we will be working on the next release )
Thanks for the info.
No additional changes are anticipated for the 2.1 release (of course after the 2.1 release we will be working on the next release >
I’ll look forward to a multi-column effects menu then.
Keep only a few sub-menu to group by type etc and 150+ plugins could easily be on view with no
scrolling or submenu access required. I think Gale has already added my vote.
I appreciate the latest attempt to improve the menu but after years of using various browsers I haven’t found any comparable solution (I’m a bit of a browser buff).
In my browsers the menu split can be toggled on or off in settings