I experience a problem with Audacity 2.3.2 on Windows 10.
Yellow snap guides keep on showing even though snapping is off. See screenshot below. The snap guides show when the cursor is close to the finish time of other tracks. I need to type Esc every time to cancel snapping. Yet it snaps again just a few pixels further as I have many short tracks. Except for the Snap-To option which is already Off, I did not find a way to turn snapping off for good so there is probably a bug with this option.
I have made a small project in the enclosed archive to illustrate this problem. If you try to select the noise section in the last track, it will snap to the finish times of the previous tracks. To select only the noise section, you need to zoom in quite a lot. snapping bug.zip (11.5 KB)
If you zoom in a bit, you will be able to select much more precisely. Here I have selected from the first sample after the sine wave in track 5.
Personally I like to use “Ctrl + Mouse wheel” for zooming, but there are other methods: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/zooming.html
Hi Steve. Thank you for the workaround. This is not very practical though because in some cases, I need an insane level of zoom - and time - to avoid them. What I need is to get rid of snapping for good.
There’s also no way to achieve very accurate selecting without zooming. If accuracy is important enough to bother zooming, then I don’t see any reason for you to complain. If accuracy IS important, then zoom in. You can have your cake, or eat it, whichever you prefer.
A comment on the snap to boundary feature. It’s unfortunate you can’t turn it off. It’s very irritating when editing an audiobook. This is because I have all the scenes of a chapter in one project and the yellow boundary line tries to get me to line up with the elements in the other scenes when I try to copy or cut. It prevents me from grabbing where I want to unless I zoom way out which is time-consuming for audiobook creation, and even then the yellow line can get in the way. It definitely doesn’t work for my workflow. I’ve read the comments left for others with a similar issue and I don’t think those leaving them understand the features uselessness for audiobook editing. The feature, I can see, is great for music production though and I would welcome it in that arena, though I use Nuendo and Steinberg Cubase for that. I’ve stayed with Audacity cause overall I like the program. I just wonder why the ability to deactivate the feature was never implemented? Maybe audiobooks weren’t a pressing need in those days.
Probably because of all the hundreds (thousands?) of audiobook producers that use Audacity, we’ve only received two complaints about this feature (you are the second), and that’s despite the fact that one of the lead developers works a lot with audiobook producers.
As waxcylinder wrote, I expect that if you become familiar with mouse wheel zooming, not only will that speed up your workflow, but will also eliminate the snapping guide distraction and improve the precision of your edits.
