Hi guys, first, let me say that I really do love Audacity 
However, there have always been certain aspects that I find seriously clunky and irritating. For years, I’ve kept thinking these issues would eventually get ironed out, but they never seem to, so I’m going to list all the issues here, with my proposed solutions.
I’m sure many of these must have been mentioned/requested before (perhaps there are even workarounds) but you’ll have to forgive me for not having the patience for looking them all up. Take what you want from this feedback!
1. Track names not clear enough
When your document contains dozens of tracks, the track names are EVERYTHING! You are completely dependent upon these names to know what you’re looking at. Yet these names are crammed into a very small space with indistinctive text. You can’t even resize the left panel to allow more room to show names.
Here is my proposed solution, to allow more room for the titles:
If nothing else, I really do think things would look a lot neater this way, especially making all the numbers on the right single-digit.
2. It’s hard to grab tracks
When you want to grab a track to move it, you instinctively want to grab somewhere near the top. But currently Audacity requires you to grab tracks near the bottom in a small area of leftover space. It’s not very elegant.
Solution: As shown in my illustration above, make the title bar the part that you grab. This can also be used for selecting multiple tracks - this removes the ‘Select’ button which takes up space and adds clutter.
3. Renaming tracks is a pain
I would say that the ability to quickly and easily rename tracks is an essential part of a quick workflow, but currently Audacity requires you to click twice, wait for a pop-up dialog to appear, rename it, then OK that. It’s really clumsy.
Solution: You should be able to simply click on the name and the title text becomes editable right there. Hit Enter to finish editing. Simple.
4. Zooming is cumbersome
Zooming requires hitting keys, it doesn’t allow precise zooming, and because of the steps between jumps, it can sometimes be hard to get a sense of how much you’re zooming.
Solution: Give Audacity a new zoom control: Hold down Alt + mouse wheel = zooms in smaller increments.
Even better solution: Alt + left mouse button + drag mouse left and right = a precise, real-time zoom (perhaps using hardware scaling, like Photoshop’s “scrubby zoom” feature)
5. Tracks are too tall
When you first open a document, the track height is nice and big as it should be. But once you pass 3 or 4 tracks and start having to scroll, the tracks are just impractically tall.
Solution: Audacity gets a new option: Auto track height (on by default): The result is that when you only have a couple of tracks, they will be tall, however, as more tracks are added, they begin shrinking slightly in height, down to a minimum height when you reach a certain number of tracks. (Options could let you specify the ‘tallest’ and ‘shortest’ heights in pixels, plus the number of tracks till shortest height is used.)
It would also be good to have a slider in the corner of the screen to universally change all the track heights.
6. Draggable track heights is annoying
Others may disagree, but personally, I find it really irritating how track heights can be resized arbitrarily, so you can end up with all kinds of messy different heights. I like uniformity. I like to feel that the interface is “solid” and “locked” and I’m not going to accidentally resize anything.
Solution: Audacity gets a new option in the prefs: Allow tracks to be manually resized. When this is off, tracks can’t be manually resized, however, if you want to make a track bigger, there is now an new button in the left panel called Expand track - Clicking this button instantly toggles the track between 100% height and 162% height (this is the height I think is most useful).
Personally, I would much prefer if it worked this way. Instead of the uncertainty and inconsistency of draggable track heights, they are all uniform - expanded by clicking one simple button, then the same button toggles them back to standard height.
7. No pan tool
Having to use scrollbars to move around the document can be irritating.
Solution: When space is HELD DOWN (not tapped), the cursor changes to a hand (pan) tool. You can now drag the document in any direction to quickly move around. This would make the application feel SO MUCH MORE professional!
8. No groups
My documents seem to quickly get very confusing and cluttered, with dozens of tracks, requiring a lot of scrolling up and down past elements I wish I could tidy away into groups.
Solution: Allow tracks to be put into collapsible groups. The result might look something like this: (Note this is a very crude illustration)
9. Mouse wheel scrolling is annoying
I find it annoying that scrolling up and down with the mouse wheel moves a fixed distance. I would find it WAY more helpful if each click of the wheel moved up/down by one whole track, so there’s always a whole track at the leading edge of the screen, instead of a truncated one.
If nothing else, you should be able to hold down a key (eg shift) + mouse wheel to scroll whole tracks.
10. Duplicated files remain selected
This is a minor point… When I duplicate tracks, I find it annoying that the ORIGINAL tracks remain selected, along with the duplicates. This is NEVER useful to me. Very often, I have a bunch of tracks and I want to create a mixed version of them, so what do I do? I duplicate them and hit the ‘mix’ key… oops… the original tracks were also selected and they got mixed in too! 
11. Dragging moves too fast
So we now come to my top four most frustrating things about Audacity. Firstly…
It is SO difficult to drag tracks up and down to re-order them! You can begin dragging them up or down the screen no problem, but once scrolling begins, it starts whizzing up or down at such an incredible pace, it’s virtually impossible to find the place you’re looking for, everything is just a blur. I find this quite crippling to productivity, and I go to great lengths to avoid having to drag tracks.
Solution: Scrolling while dragging tracks should either always start slow then speed up, or (ideally) the speed should be based on how far you’ve moved the mouse after crossing the edge of the window - very slow if you’re at the edge, increasing in speed as your mouse travels further.
12. Duplicating irritation
Now this is probably THE biggest thing that annoys me about Audacity - you duplicate a track (or make a new track) and it appears right at the bottom below the very bottom track! This is so frustrating because you’re obviously already working on that track right there where you are, and your duplication obviously relates to the current track in the current location.
Solution: New/duplicate tracks should ALWAYS appear right below the current track. I also think there should be a nice big button somewhere for “Add track below the current one”. Surely this is one of the most fundamental things that users want to do?
13. Pasting nightmare
Another one of my four biggest annoyances is when I’ve copied some audio in the clipboard and want to paste it in to the document. In every single case, I ALWAYS want to paste it directly below the current track at the current playhead position. But of course, Audacity makes this impossible because:
a) As said above, when I create a new track, the track always appears right down below the bottom track.
b) Then, when I’ve scrolled down to the bottom, I can no longer see the current playhead position, so I’m guessing where to paste it
c) I then have to drag the new track all the way up to where I was, which is a nightmare, both finding where I was, and getting the track back there.
Solution: As said above, making ‘new track’ appear directly below the current track would help a great deal. However, it’s still a little cumbersome having to create a new track - there should be an easy way to simply paste audio in BELOW the current track at the current position. Audacity has a ‘paste’ button, which is totally redundant as it just does a Ctrl+V. Instead, Audacity should have a ‘Paste below’ button which pastes the clipboard into a new track at the current position!
14. Pasting into blank space
The fourth and final of my ‘top four’ most annoying problems is when you go right down and click on that strip of ‘blank space’ below the bottom track. Hitting Ctrl+V creates a new track and pastes the clipboard into it. This is a handy feature—in theory!
However, in reality, the pasted audio ALWAYS appears right at the beginning of the song! This is almost never what you want, and it means you have to “lose your place” by zooming out or scrolling all the way to the left to find the pasted audio, then scrolling all the way back to where you were working!
Solution: This problem would disappear if Audacity simply allowed you to position the playhead in the blank space below the bottom track. Then, when you hit Ctrl+V, the clipboard contents is pasted right there in position!
15. Cut/paste causing ‘ripple’
Sometimes in Audacity you have ‘independent’ potions of audio on the same track, separated by gaps. You can use the Time Shift tool to move these portions left and right, and because they’re not connected to the audio on the right, the audio on the right doesn’t move. There is no ‘ripple’ effect. And this is exactly how it should be.
However, if you perform either cut or paste operations to these ‘independent’ portions of audio, any audio to the right IS ‘rippled’, even though it wasn’t in any way connected.
I find this highly undesirable and unintuitive. I believe that audio to the right should NOT be rippled IF:
• The pasted audio can fit without intersecting any existing audio.
• The right-hand edge of the cut portion intersects NO audio, and falls entirely in a gap.
16. Colored tracks/title
Finally, this is more of a feature suggestion than a complaint, but I would find it very helpful if track titles had colors (see my illustration at the top here). Each new track would be assigned a color (cycling through a pool of predefined colors). But any duplicating or copying/pasting would result in the color being retained, so you could visually see that they are related. You could also select a bunch of tracks and assign a color to them.
I’d be very happy to go into more details about any of the above suggestions, or provide more illustrations/icon designs etc (I am a designer). I also would have many other more minor interface suggestions, but these, for me, are the ‘big ones’.
If the above 16 problems could be resolved, I think it would really take Audacity to new heights of professionalism!
