Using Stop rewinds to beginning or selection point

Hello. I’m very new to Audacity and to this forum. I’m running Audacity 2.1.3 on Mac OS 10.11.6. I’m trying to edit some mono spoken audio material for a podcast and am having trouble with the keyboard and mouse functions. Primarily, whenever I use either the Stop button or the spacebar to stop listening to playback, then hit Play or the spacebar again, it automatically rewinds back to the beginning or the most recent selection point.

It’s extremely frustrating because I intend for it to begin playing again from the Stop point. I ended up placing a bunch of unnecessary selection points (every thirty seconds or so) during playback just so when I stopped, it wouldn’t go all the way back to the beginning.

I’ve Googled and checked the forum to no avail, but I could be using the wrong words in the search, being new. My questions are: how can I keep the Stop from going backwards? And how can I get rid of the unnecessary selection points when I’m finished? Thanks very much.

For a start that’s a very old version of Audacity - the latest release is 2.2.2 which you can get from here:
https://www.audacityteam.org/download/mac/
and 2.3.0 will be out soon (hopefully)

In these later versions there is a new command:
Transport > Play/Stop and Set Cursor (or its shortcut X) to stop and set the cursor at the stop point.

precisely what you want

WC

In older versions you could just press P (pause) and then P again to start up from the same place.

Koz

Thank you, waxcylinder and kozikowski. I downloaded the newer version and both the X and the P work. IMHO, it’s not very instinctive, when people are generally used to pausing movies and streams with the “||” key and picking right up where they left off, but I’m certainly glad to know about these shortcuts. Very helpful.