Edit > Undo: track specific

longtime user, first-time poster. let me start by saying how great Audacity is - easy to use, intuitive - doesn’t get in the way of making music :slight_smile:. love it. i’ve recorded hundreds of recordings using audacity to join drumless tracks (show mixes) to my drumming tracks (and mixing accordingly), then doing a final video production in windows movie maker. here’s a link to my youtube drumming channel (every recording used Audacity):

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4jC3zCmnxL1vDNw2IrGaog

okay, on to my question/request: perhaps what i’m wanting is already listed on the feature requests page as “Undo History > More detailed/organised > should have separate entries for each track”, but i’m not sure. here’s what i wish would happen:

when creating a separate reverb track (wet only) for my drumming track, i wish Undo remembered each track’s last action, so that i could come back to the reverb track and undo the reverb setting (e.g. Medium room) and apply a different reverb (e.g. small bright room), so that at the end of my mix process i could choose which reverb sounds best when combined with the overall mix. session-only track-specific Undo would be fine with me.

and if i were to get greedy, i wish there were a few more reverb factory presets.

thanks for reading and considering!

That is not currently possible. Because Audacity is a “destructive” (WYSIWYG) editor, each action that changes the project builds on top of the previous changes. Thus the Undo history is a strictly chronological sequence of “states”.

A workaround that can be useful in some situations:
Say that you have two audio track.
You make some changes to track A.
You make some changes to track B.

You now want to undo the changes to track A without undoing the changes to track B.

Here’s the trick:
Select track B and copy it.
Undo repeatedly until you have undone the changes to track B and track A.
Paste the copy of track B back to track B - you have now restored track B to the state it was before doing the Undos.

The long term planning for Audacity includes the possibility of “real time processing”, which means being able to add effects to tracks and take them off again or change the settings at any time without affecting other tracks. This will probably be ideal for your use case, though it could be quite a while before Audacity has this ability (it’s technically a huge change for Audacity, but one that we would like to see).



Are you aware that you can save your own settings as preset? Use the “Save Preset” option under the “Manage” button and you can add “User Presets”.