navigating labels?

i’m trying to put together a macro that requires me to navigate between labels but have not found the necessary menu or macro entries to do so.

i found a posting in the windows forum here that describes using the tab key to navigate from one labeled region to the next. that would be extremely useful but i can’t find it in the macro options or even the keyboard preferences. in the keyboard prefs, if i search for the tab key, nothing comes up. if i could find that i could navigate from region to region and use existing options to put the cursor at the beginning or end or said region. i can’t find a way to navigate the regions, though, without breaking out of the macro, hitting the tab key, then running another macri to resume. that all kind of makes it so cumbersome as to be pointless.

is there no way to navigate label regions using a macro?

thanks,
babag

What are you hoping to do with the macro?

thanks, steve. select the space between regions. if i could navigate the regions i could send the cursor to the start/end and make a selection that way i think.

babag

I still don’t know what you are trying to do, but Macros don’t support logical operators or iterators.

don’t need that.

let’s say i start with the cursor at the project start. i need to be able to jump to the next marked region. then i perform a couple of tasks in the macro. then i need to jump to the next region. i can find commands to jump to clip boundaries and to select the next clip or previous clip but find no analogous command that lets me jump from marked region to region or region boundaries. hope that’s clear.

thanks again,
babag

“MoveToNextLabel:” and “MoveToPrevLabel:”

thanks! just what i was looking for.

did i just miss it or are these not in any menus? they’re in the macro options but i didn’t find them in any menus. if they’re actually not in the menus, are there other things that are not in menus? is there a list someplace?

thanks,
babag

They’re in the “Extra” menu.

The “Extra” menu has a lot of commands that are rarely used in normal editing, so it is hidden by default. To see the Extra menu, enable it in the “View” menu.

thanks, steve. on audacity 2.3.3 here and i don’t see them in my extras menu. oops. spoke too soon. found them in the ‘play-at-speed’ submenu.
i’d have expected them in the transport or seek or selection or cursor or track submenu.


babag

In Audacity 2.4.2 they are here: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/extra_menu_play_at_speed.html

Crossed posts :wink:

Yes the location is rather strange, but they don’t really “fit” in any of the sub-menus.

frankly, i’d have put them in ‘edit—>labeled audio’.

All of the other items in ‘edit—>labeled audio’ perform edits to labelled audio.

I’m thinking that because we have a number of “Label” related commands in the Edit menu, and there’s little reason to have these two commands in a main menu (much easier to just tab across the labels than to use menu items), that “Extra > Edit > Move to … Label” would be reasonable.

sorry but this just sounds wrong to me. it sounds like a formula to frustrate new users and cause them to bug the audacity team and forum looking for answers. that’s what i did.

locating these commands in a sometimes hidden menu under a heading associated with playback speed is asking people to never find them. if one doesn’t ever change their playback speed, assuming they even have the extras menu visible, they’re probably always going to skip over it and never find these options. and, probably the first thing i’d be doing in looking for something like this is to peruse the menus before going to google and the manual. again, if it’s someplace i’d skip over, it will never be found.

these options seem to me to be far more related to navigation and selection than playback speed. and, as for these options not conforming to the edit criteria for the edit menu, there are precedents throughout the menus for dividing submenus into sections. give these their own section. and, while we’re at it, add some other options like ‘start of next labeled audio’ and ‘end of next labelled audio’ and ‘start of previous labelled audio’ and end of previous labelled audio.’ still seems wrong to have these in ‘edit—>labelled audio’? try ‘transport—>cursor to.’ or someplace in the selection menu. they have more to do with selection than playback speed. as you navigate through them, after all, what happens? oh, yeah, selection.

i’m experimenting with using these options to get around the limitations of destructive editing. while i cannot pull a clip open or drag it further closed, i CAN drag the edges of labels further open or closed. it’s klunky as hell but it does allow for more flexibility before committing to an edit.

thanks and sorry if this turned into a rant,
babag

Those commands are mainly supplied in the “hidden” Extra menu for the benefit of Visually Impaired users.

They were put in one of the Extra Menus just so the developer could hang a couple of shortcuts on them Alt+Right and Alt+Left (Audacity can’t have shortcuts without a command to assign them to).

The shortcuts are documented in the Manual:
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/label_tracks.html#navigating

And yes

Extra menu > Play at Speed > Move to …

was a bit of an odd choice :confused:

WC