Audacity Forum

I note 3 modes of waveform display scrolling while recording:

1: When cursor reaches end of screen, tracks jump back a couple of inches;
2: When cursor reaches end of screen, tracks jump back full screen width;
3: No automatic scrolling but manual scrolling still works.

When in mode 3, I managed to switch to one of the other modes by deselecting all, but couldn't get it to change while recording.
Switching the focus among tracks seems not to affect scrolling.

What determines which mode is selected?

As far as I'm aware:

DickN wrote:1: When cursor reaches end of screen, tracks jump back a couple of inches;

Applies when recording into an empty (new) Audacity Project.

DickN wrote:2: When cursor reaches end of screen, tracks jump back full screen width;

Applies when other tracks already exist in the project and contain audio data.

DickN wrote:3: No automatic scrolling but manual scrolling still works.

Is set in Preferences > Tracks tab (Update display while playing).

DickN wrote:When in mode 3, I managed to switch to one of the other modes by deselecting all, but couldn't get it to change while recording.

I'm not sure that I understand that. Could you give detailed steps of how I can reproduce that behaviour.

On the occasion when I got it out of mode 3 (no auto scrolling), I used Shift-Ctrl-A to deselect everything. But it seems that doesn't always do the trick either, and now I'm not even sure whether it had anything to do with getting out of mode 3.

I haven't found a way to predict which mode it will be in when I start recording. I haven't had any problem when recording the 1st track. What I've been doing is making a collection of excerpts from a lot of cassette tapes. Each project contains excerpts from multiple tapes, and I put each tape on a separate track so I can tweak them individually. Presently I have 8 Audacity windows open so I can compare versions of each song and occasionally move a track to a different project. Each track starts at the end of the previous track on the time line to allow using a single label track. Generally at the end of each recording I select the whole track, then Ctrl-B and type in a range label. Then, possibly after listening and plunking down some point labels, I click the ">>" button, Pause, Rec, and start looking for the next selection on the next tape. These are songs from one of our vocalists at church.

Sometimes when I start a new track there is no automatic scrolling, but not always. There may be one or a half-dozen other audio tracks in the project when this happens. It has also happened when recording a track starting at the beginning of another track, e.g. when I want to replace one of them (or part of one) with a better version. I've tried having various things selected before recording and moving the focus between label and audio tracks, no correlation evident. Selecting nothing (Ctrl-Shift-A) seemed to work at least once.

I haven't changed anything in Preferences. "Update display while playing" is ticked.

No much to go on - I was hoping somebody could tell me what rules Audacity uses to decide which mode to use and that would give me a clue what I'm doing that changes it.

I suspect that the "not scrolling" is a performance issue. As far as I'm aware the display should scroll unless "Update display while playing" is deselected, however, scrolling may not occur if the computer does not have sufficient resources available to update the display.

As an experiment, try working with a single project open and see if the "rules" in my last post hold true. If they do, then add another project and/or a more complex (more audio tracks) project and see if there is a breakdown of the rules as the number of open projects or complexity of the projects increase. I'd be interested to know what you discover as I am currently unable to reproduce the behaviour that you are reporting.