Turn off loop feature (3.1)

Please add a feature to disable looping altogether. I find it very annoying when an accidental mouse drag causes the loop feature to be activated.

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Thanks for your request. I’ll pass it on to the developers. I think they are still refining this new feature.

Be aware that “accidental mouse drags” of all sorts can be cancelled if you hit the ESC key before button-up.

hit the ESC key before button-up

Writing that down.

Koz

That’s a very nice idea, and it works very nicely. The only problem that I find is that if I have made an “accidental mouse drag”, I don’t realise that I have done so until key up (when something unexpected or unwanted happens), by which time it is too late to ESC out of.

In some cases I can “Ctrl + Z” to undo, but that does not work in this case.

I think there still needs to be a way to turn off looping or the loop gesture altogether. Pressing ESC every time is very tedious.

This loop feature is seriously an issue. It has slowed down my work way too much. I am ready to jump ship and look for other software at this point. A lot of the changes in the latest updates have really not helped me at all, but this one is slowing down my work. Terrible design on that one. I set out googling ways to disable it and just found myself wanting to vent about it, so here I am.

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This is literally the first time I have ever posted on a software feedback forum like this. I landed here by googling “Audacity 3.1 loop annoying”.

I echo what the previous posters said above. There has to be a way to shut this feature off. When I am editing a project quickly I like to click above the track where it shows the time segments as that automatically moves the playhead and starts playing the project at that point (vs clicking in the track to move the playhead and then having to press space). Now if you have any mouse travel at all when you click, instead of moving the playhead and playing the project the loop is enabled where Audacity is looking for the user to define a region. I now have to take the extra time to make sure the mouse is not moving when I click, or else the feature gets switched on. The ESC remedy doesn’t make sense as a resolution because you don’t know that it’s happened until after you have made the click and you still have to click again to get where you want in the timeline.

For now I am going back to 3.04 as I find the editing process cumbersome with 3.1

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I concur with those who find this annoying. The timeline band isn’t tall enough to avoid accidentally adding a loop when clicking for instant play. I’d be interested to know how many users need that facility; I certainly don’t. Please add a total disable facility ASAP.

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Until there’s a new version of Audacity that you are happy with, there are older versions of Audacity available here: Old Audacity versions download

A million times yes! I registered on this forum for only this reason!

I jump around with quick playback and an accidental drag means now a looped selection.

I am also a first time poster chiming in to ask for a way to disable the new looping feature. It’s not something I use and I find it getting in the way of my editing. I will go back to a previous version of audacity for now. Thanks!

Add me to the users who are annoyed beyond belief with the looping feature. We should be able to turn it on and off. After the update, every time I click in the timeline, it creates a loop region and I have to delete it. Makes we wonder if the programmers actually use Audacity. This is the very first complaint I’ve had about this program. PLEASE tweak this feature so the loop button positively turns the feature on and off. The curser should not be able to create the loop without clicking on the feature first.

I think it’s more likely that the developers will see your views on the new Discord channel: https://discord.gg/audacity

I plan to write there later today about this (and possibly on GitHub too)

I am strongly of the opinion that the user should be in control of looping and not the app.

a) the user should be able to totally control when looping is on or off (via the new looping button)
b) clicking and dragging in the lop region should not be a hidden mechanism to turn looping on
c) with looping off it should not be possible to click and drag in the timeline to create a loop region
d) once the user has turned looping on - then a click and drag in Timeline should create a loop region

e) And ideally if looping is off then there should be no loop region displayed, even if the user had previously created one when they had looping turned on.
f) It would be reasonable for Audacity to remember and recall a previously set loop region for when the user turns on lopping again.

The automatic turning on of looping by click and drag in the Timeline creates yet another bear-trap for the unwary - and Audacity has plenty enough of those already.

Peter.

I have written a note about this on the 3-2 channel on the Audacity Discord.

Peter.

I agree that the user should be in control of looping. In order to increase a user’s control of setting loop regions there should be a toggle option for “automatically set loop region” that a user can select. This would remove the redundancy of enabling looping, selecting an audio track, and then selecting a loop region. If a user wants independent loop and selection regions, then they can either disable or ignore this toggle option.

While I’m sure that the new loop mechanism has improved the workflow for some users, it has increased redundancy and UI clunkiness for others. A toggle option as I mentioned above would make this feature more usable for both use cases.

Another first-time poster asking for the Looping controls to be disable-able. I need Audacity 3+ to fix a major issue I was having with 24-bit audio with version 2, but the looping UI is driving me a little crazy. As I use Audacity to splice many clips together into 1 file, I am constantly skipping around in a track by clicking at the top of the timeline area where it immediately plays starting from wherever you click. But I have never been the world’s most accurate clicker and now with the looping feature, I am regularly clicking a little bit too low and setting a looping region instead of just playing. It is quite frustrating. Hopefully it will get easier as I get used to the new version but I would definitely prefer to be able to disable this feature. Thanks for the wonderful software!

Barring disablement, it would also be a little easier if there was a clear visible delineation between the area that will set a looping region and the area that will just play from the point you click.

It’s the exact same area (the “Timeline”)

Left click starts playback from the click position.
Click and drag creates a loop region.

Yes, but it’s far too easy to click and accidentally drag a few pixels thus creating a minute and fairly useless loop region.

Tantacrul (Martin Keary, UX responsible person in Muse) proposed that there be a tolerance region of a few (or several) pixels - ans he assigned this to a developer but thus far no action has been taken on this.

See Tantacrul’s GitHub Iogged P2 issue:

@mattlambertson - I have added your comment to the GitHub thread.


And I am also a similarly frustrated user about this - it happened to me several times yesterday while I was editing (and I even know about this problem and how to avoid it).

Peter.