Why does it zoom to 0db on undo? Bug or setting?

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

I set my tracks to “Waveform (dB)”. Audacity 2.1.3 on Windows 10

I periodically need to work with quiet audio. I’ll adjust the vertical zoom to eliminate unnecessary headroom from the display. Sometimes, I’ll use the top of the display as a guide when using the envelope tool to achieve consistent volume. The problem is, sometimes the display will automatically zoom out (vertically) to display all that useless headroom, all the way up to 0dB. This is nonsensical, and I really wish it would stop. I’m not sure all of the things that trigger this, but “undo” is one of them. Selecting “undo” should not monkey about with my zoom levels!

It doesn’t touch the bottom boundary of my zoom, only the top. It doesn’t do this in the default “Waveform” view or in “Spectrogram”, only in “Waveform (dB)”.

Is this a setting that I can turn off somewhere? I’ve looked for it, but I’m not sure what it might be called.

2

Thanks for the report. Here are the vertical scale actions for 2.1.3: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/audio_tracks.html#scale.

As a general rule, if you perform an edit, zoom vertically then Undo the edit, the zoom does go back to the level before the edit. There is no setting.

I agree if you do this in Waveform (dB) view you become much more zoomed out after Undo. It seems to be a bug introduced in 2.1.3, so you could go back to 2.1.2 if it is too troublesome: http://www.oldfoss.com/Audacity.html.

If this is not on our bug tracker then it will be added in due course.

If there is some nuance to the issue not covered above, please let us know.


Gale