Audacity Forum

I'm sure this is because I'm stupid, but for the life of me I can't trim or cut a clip. Following the tutorial, I click and drag to highlight the section I want, but Trim, Cut, and most of the options under the Edit menu are grayed out, and using the delete key doesn't do anything. Is there something obvious that I'm not doing? Thanks for any help.

Are sure that you have actually selected some audio - it should be highlighted as dark grey background in the track panel with the blue waveforms.

Just as a test try selecting the whole project by using CTRL+A - do the Edit menu items become available for use and not greyed-out then?

WC

I'm pretty sure. Here is a link to a screenshot of my highlighted area of the clip, and the dropdown menu with many of the options grayed out:

http://40tech.com/wp-content/images/audacity.jpg

It does seem to work if I select something immediately after loading a file. Once I do anything else, such as scrubbing in the timeline, I get what is shown in the screenshot, above. This is whether I click and drag, or use CTRL+A.

Well this is puzzling...

Yes your screenshot does indeed show that the audio is properly selected - and thus the edit commands should become available to operate on the selected audio - but I see from the screenshot that they are greyed out.

I just tested this in my old copy of 1.2.4b Audacity on my Windows-XP-HE-SP3 system and it all worked ok. I recorded a short piec of audio, selected a section from the middle with click&drag and then applied the Edit>Trim - and it trimmed the audio as it should. So I'm stumped


It might be worth you while trying this out on the latest Audacity Beta 1.3.12 - in spite of the Beta labelling the latest Beta is probably more stable on many platforms than the now ancient 1.2.6 (BTW what vn. of Audacity are you using?). You can get 1.3.12 from here: http://audacityteam.org/download/

WC

Thanks for the reply. I actually realize I have this posted in the wrong forum, as I'm on Windows 7 and therefore am using the Beta. I wonder if that has anything to do with it.

ok I'll move it over to the Beta section of the forum - WC

Still puzzling. I just tested this again on my 1.3.12 (Windows XP not 7) - and again the click and drag selection works fine, the edit commands are not greyed out and the Trim works fine.

I cann't imagine why W7 might cause this - we have plenty of W7 posters who can't get started properly - but your is obviosly up and running.

Can you try resetting you Audacity Preferences? See this page in the Wiki http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Audac ... defaults_2 for instructions on how to do that.

WC

cyberskier wrote:Here is a link to a screenshot of my highlighted area of the clip, and the dropdown menu with many of the options grayed out:

If I'm not mistaken, I think I can see the edge of the Pause button, and it is depressed.
To use effects (and most other functions) Audacity must be "Stopped", not playing, recording or paused.

Thanks, that looks like that's it (I have it on pause). So is there no way to play a track, pause it when you find the spot where you want to break it, and then delete? When I hit stop, it goes back to the start. It would be nice to be able to pause and delete as I go.

Instead of Pause, press SHIFT+A
This will stop playback, but will leave the cursor in the current position.

SHIFT+A = Play/Stop and set cursor.