Audacity Forum

I recorded a long list of records and was putting lables at the begining of each song. At one label i wanted to change the song no. to a new number. I selected the lable and used the back space key to remove the old no. and insert a new one. I did this several times. When i did another label i backed spaced four times instead of three and lost 1 hr. and 20 min. of music, the entire file is gone. I tried this several times with the same effect. When i restart the program 1.3 and load the file from the folder the is no music there. When i try to load file again the program says the file is already open in another window. I have windows Vista. I downloaded the program again and tested what had happened and it did the same thing. I wonder how one could lose everything with one key stroke. The program never asked if i wanted to save the new changes. It just went away. Larry

When it happened, did you try to "undo"? (Ctrl-Z or Edit menu -> Undo)

What operating system do you have? And which audacity version? (Help menu -> About)

At the time i probably did not try undo feature. I have Vista Home premium and am using audacity verson 1.3.12 beta. I can try another song and try to change song no. and see if undo is there if i lose the song.

You can undo any action at any time by using the Undo function (Ctrl-Z or Edit menu -> Undo).

When you delete the label text if you press backspace again it will delete that label and after that the whole track is selected if you press backspace again (or delete key) it will delete the whole track. If you do this by accident you can undo the action (as long as you don't close the project/audacity.

To avoid this there's one thing you can do: go to Preferences -> Keyboard and from the category pop-down menu select "Command". Then scroll down through the list of commands and look for the one that says "DeleteKey". It's probably assigned to Backspace. Select "DeleteKey" and click on "Clear" or assign another key to it different from Backspace. Click "OK" and if you try it now you'll the backspace no longer deletes tracks.

Edit note: this is not a compiling audacity problem so I'm moving this to the audacity help forums.

The Preference that bites people most often is "Select all audio in project if none selected". It is under Preferences > Tracks. Turn it off and you will never accidentally delete your entire project.

-- Bill

billw58 wrote:The Preference that bites people most often is "Select all audio in project if none selected". It is under Preferences > Tracks. Turn it off and you will never accidentally delete your entire project.

-- Bill

A big +1 to that suggestion

Why on earth that risky setting is the default one baffles me.

WC

Thanks for the advice. Now i can get back to recording our old 45`s and 33 to copy to cd`s Thanks Again. Larry

waxcylinder wrote: Why on earth that risky setting is the default one baffles me.

It's there for the people who try to apply an effect with no audio selected and can't figure out why everything is greyed out in the Effect menu.

1.3.13 apparently gets around the deleting-a-label-and-delete-the-whole-project problem by ignoring the delete key after you have deleted the label, even if the "select all" pref is on. It threw me for a loop and I raised a question on -quality about it, but have had no replies.

... a little later ...

Ah, I see it now. If there is a selection that spans audio and label tracks, but a label track has keyboard focus and you press delete, nothing happens.

-- Bill

Why on earth that risky setting is the default one baffles me.

It was a hard fought battle to get that. Your application is an unfortunate side issue. The real issue was opening up a show and Effect > Amplify. Of course you want it applied to the whole show. What else could you possibly want? The earlier Audacity versions made you manually select the whole show (or any segment inside) and then apply the Effect. That resulted in many, many postings wanting to know why the Effects didn't work.

Koz