(feature idea) scroll-and-center [solved]

[Jeol]

Hi

I found out about Audacity because I had to edit a couple of voice overlays. Mostly stopping and deleting small parts of silence, coughs and lip noises.

Because of this I thought that it would be nice to have the option to scroll-and-center on stop. What do you think of this?

The usefulness for this would be when working pretty zoomed in and something that should be edited happens to be just at the edge of the visible sound graph. This way, I would not have to adjust the view each time it's happening.

=) Agreed, it's not terribly inconvenient, but it would still be nice.
I might try write a patch for this later, but I'm not confident of my skills for this, hehe.

Kind regards,
Joel

[kozikowski]

<<<Because of this I thought that it would be nice to have the option to scroll-and-center on stop. What do you think of this?>>>

A cousin to another common feature request called scratching. Play live no matter how fast the cursor is moving or which direction.

Audacity does have a Preference called Interface > Update Display While Playing. I turn it off because what it really does is switch to the next display when it gets to the end of this one. It doesn't smoothly scroll. It drives newbies nuts. "Where did my edit point go?"

Both features also feature one other thing that causes problems. They make it absolutely necessary to have a really large, fast, clean computer. About every fifth complaint on the forums is from somebody who got a damaged recording because they're trying to do complex editing on a fifteen ounce Acer laptop with no processor and no memory.

What's wrong with this picture?

There is a New Feature part of the forum.

http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewforum.php?f=20

Koz

[Jeol]

Ah. But is what I'm thinking about really a cousin to scratching? What I proposed should not add any more overhead than a single screen update when stopping playback, and subsequently saving me from scrolling back every now and then the noise coincide when a screen update is done. Well, nevermind, having an option for this would at best be a kind of kludge because sometimes I'd want it -- and sometimes not.


But now onto the relevant part:
I have worked a lot more with audacity and now I found a good solution! It was painfully simple, and it's hard to say whether I did not realize or know that it could be done. Well, I'll try explain what I do now...

Say I hear the speaker burp loudly while listening to a hour long speech. Then I'd...

• Use pause! (p on the keyboard)
  This is to keep the marker where it was playing and this way I can look at something else instead of keeping track of it. (well, I found out this pretty quick)
• Selecting outside the current view works! Just drag and audacity will scroll for you.
  This saves me from using the scrollbar whenever the noise overshoot the currently visible part by a second or two. Using the scrollbar is nigh impossible anyways when having a well zoomed 30 minute long session anyways, so before I figured this out I ended up using the small left/right buttons on each side. The mouse selection tool adjusts the scroll speed to your zoom level, so now I hardly ever use it.

This saves many clicks, and the work is done a little bit faster. =) Yaay!

[waxcylinder]

Say I hear the speaker burp loudly while listening to a hour long speech. Then I'd...

• Use pause! (p on the keyboard)
  This is to keep the marker where it was playing and this way I can look at something else instead of keeping track of it. (well, I found out this pretty quick)

Jeol,

you may prefer to set a marker while the audio is playing rather than pausing the audio, In 1.3.x you can press CTRL+M while the audio is playing (or even recording) and Audacity will then set a marker in a label track - the marker is really just a label. You can then locate each glitch in turn at a later time - when focus is in the label you can use TAB to skip to the next label.

WC