Audacity Forum

About 5 years ago I posted this same question and received several "me toos" wondering the same thing. Consensus was that it might be available in the new 2.0 version. Well, it doesn't look like it made the cut in V2 and I still have dozens of effects that I have no idea what they do and they take up a HUGE amount of time in navigating through them. Is there a way I can at least delete a bunch of the arcane ones? Is there any docs on what they all do? It's really annoying to have to click the little up/down arrows to slowly pore through the list.

(Win7pro with V2.0.5)

2.0.7 might have a "stop-gap" feature to export the effects list to a text file, which the user could then configure.

There is a definite aim to add a text/draggable interface a year or so after that, perhaps looking like this: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Propo ... I_Examples .

Effects shipped with Audacity are documented in the Manual: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/effect_menu.html . That page says where the different types of effects are searched for.

If you have the swh-plugins set, there is minimal documentation about them provided by the author:
http://plugin.org.uk/ladspa-swh/docs/ladspa-swh.html .

You can set up keyboard shortcuts for your most used effects.


Gale

wysocki wrote: It's really annoying to have to click the little up/down arrows to slowly pore through the list.

when the effects list is shown, pressing a letter key will jump to that part of the alphabetical effects list,
e.g. press "V" on the keyboard to jump down to "vocoder" , rather than having to slowly scroll down from the top of the list.

Trebor wrote:

wysocki wrote: It's really annoying to have to click the little up/down arrows to slowly pore through the list.

when the effects list is shown, pressing a letter key will jump to that part of the alphabetical effects list,
e.g. press "V" on the keyboard to jump down to "vocoder" , rather than having to slowly scroll down from the top of the list.

This may not work for all effects. Especially if the shortcut is not equal to the first letter.
Example:
I have installed "Te&xt Envelope" where the '&' defines the following x as the shortcut to use.
The consequence is that pressing x in the effect menu will automatically open text envelope and not cycle through effects that might begin with x.
However, apart from this little bug (which only occurs if you change the shortcut manually), the procedure with typing the first letter works very well and probably faster than navigating through sub-categories.

Robert J. H. wrote:

Trebor wrote:

wysocki wrote: It's really annoying to have to click the little up/down arrows to slowly pore through the list.

when the effects list is shown, pressing a letter key will jump to that part of the alphabetical effects list,
e.g. press "V" on the keyboard to jump down to "vocoder" , rather than having to slowly scroll down from the top of the list.

This may not work for all effects. Especially if the shortcut is not equal to the first letter.
Example:
I have installed "Te&xt Envelope" where the '&' defines the following x as the shortcut to use.
The consequence is that pressing x in the effect menu will automatically open text envelope and not cycle through effects that might begin with x.
However, apart from this little bug (which only occurs if you change the shortcut manually), the procedure with typing the first letter works very well and probably faster than navigating through sub-categories.

Is it a bug? It's doing what you asked for, and that's the reason we don't use access keys in effects.


Gale

Gale Andrews wrote:

Robert J. H. wrote:

Trebor wrote:

wysocki wrote: It's really annoying to have to click the little up/down arrows to slowly pore through the list.

when the effects list is shown, pressing a letter key will jump to that part of the alphabetical effects list,
e.g. press "V" on the keyboard to jump down to "vocoder" , rather than having to slowly scroll down from the top of the list.

This may not work for all effects. Especially if the shortcut is not equal to the first letter.
Example:
I have installed "Te&xt Envelope" where the '&' defines the following x as the shortcut to use.
The consequence is that pressing x in the effect menu will automatically open text envelope and not cycle through effects that might begin with x.
However, apart from this little bug (which only occurs if you change the shortcut manually), the procedure with typing the first letter works very well and probably faster than navigating through sub-categories.

Is it a bug? It's doing what you asked for, and that's the reason we don't use access keys in effects.


Gale

I didn't tell it to ignore all other entries with the same initial letter.
However, that's just a thing from times long ago where no direct shortcuts could be defined for effects.

Robert J. H. wrote:

Gale Andrews wrote:

Robert J. H. wrote:

Trebor wrote:

wysocki wrote: It's really annoying to have to click the little up/down arrows to slowly pore through the list.

when the effects list is shown, pressing a letter key will jump to that part of the alphabetical effects list,
e.g. press "V" on the keyboard to jump down to "vocoder" , rather than having to slowly scroll down from the top of the list.

This may not work for all effects. Especially if the shortcut is not equal to the first letter.
Example:
I have installed "Te&xt Envelope" where the '&' defines the following x as the shortcut to use.
The consequence is that pressing x in the effect menu will automatically open text envelope and not cycle through effects that might begin with x.
However, apart from this little bug (which only occurs if you change the shortcut manually), the procedure with typing the first letter works very well and probably faster than navigating through sub-categories.

Is it a bug? It's doing what you asked for, and that's the reason we don't use access keys in effects.


Gale

I didn't tell it to ignore all other entries with the same initial letter.

Isn't that how access keys work in the other menus? They will only cycle through alternatives if there are other items in the menu with the same access key (which is a bug if that happens). Otherwise the menu item opens when its access key is pressed, and initial letters aren't considered.


Gale

Gale Andrews wrote:Isn't that how access keys work in the other menus? They will only cycle through alternatives if there are other items in the menu with the same access key (which is a bug if that happens). Otherwise the menu item opens when its access key is pressed, and initial letters aren't considered.


Gale

Sure, access keys are normally distributed randomly (just pick the next available character) and I don't know if cycling would work if the initial characters are implicitly defined or interpreted with an '&' in front.
For some effects, the manual definition wouldn't be bad. Vst plug-ins in particular tend to be ill-named and have either Vst in Front or the manufacturers name.
I'm personally not interested in the fact that it is a Vst-plug-in but rather if it is a limiter or a phaser.

Following...

What'd be great for all concerned, would be a "favorites" section at least, with "more..." listed below. (It'd also be nice if the names were a bit more descriptive in most cases).

wysocki said that years ago, I see, and I like that idea.

I was thinking lately of the lack of context menus for selections in Audio tracks. Why not cut copy paste delete and a few of your favorites? ... I am sure there would be a hundred questions to settle about details of such menus.