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Fine control of selection tool not possible. [SOLVED]

Posted: Sat Apr 23, 2011 6:39 am
by eldergeek
My wife and I are using Audacity 1.3.12-beta on Debian 6 (Squeeze) with KDE4. On her machine (2.4 GHz, Athlon II, triple core w/4 GB of RAM) she has no fine control of the selection tool. For example, when she tries to select a section of an .aup file she's unable to set the cursor exactly where she wants it. The selection tool "hops" erratically to points which behave like presets in that it always goes to the same point if her mouse cursor is within a half inch or so of that point when she clicks the left mouse button; if you hold down a right or left arrow the selection tool will hop from point to point instead of scrolling smoothly. On my machine, which is a 1.8 GHz, Athlon (single core) w/768 MB of RAM, same OS, same version of Audacity and opening the same .aup file/s (we've tried several), everything works normally.

I've tried a complete removal of Audacity (on her machine) and reinstalled it with no change in symptoms.

She says it was working normally yesterday and admits to having downloaded some updates with synaptic this morning (she checks for updates every day). My machine has the same sources.list as hers and I checked to confirm that my machine is completely up-to-date.

Suggestions? Thanks in advance and our sincere thanks to all Audacity developers. You guys rock.

Re: Fine control of selection tool not possible.

Posted: Sat Apr 23, 2011 12:36 pm
by steve
Near the bottom of the main Audacity window, de-select (un-tick) the "Snap to:" setting.

Re: Fine control of selection tool not possible.

Posted: Sat Apr 23, 2011 3:21 pm
by bgravato
You need to uncheck "snap to" like Steve suggested.
eldergeek wrote:I've tried a complete removal of Audacity (on her machine) and reinstalled it with no change in symptoms.
That won't reset audacity's preferences...

Audacity preferences are saved in ~/.audacity-data/audacity.cfg

Edit that file and remove all the content except the line NewPrefsInitialized=1 then restart Audacity.

You don't need to uninstall/reinstall audacity for that.

Re: Fine control of selection tool not possible.

Posted: Sun Apr 24, 2011 2:46 pm
by eldergeek
Awesome! She unchecked the box and it has stayed unchecked. We can't figure out how it got checked to begin with but it's working great now and that's more than enough for us. Thanks a bunch!