Looping in 3.1.2

Hi all,

Don’t know if it’s a bug or not, make a selection, then “set loop to selection”, it loops properly.
Now adjust the selection (I made it slightly longer) and the looping remains playing at the old selection
even though the selection highlight has been up dated.

It’s only once we click on “set loop to selection” again, that it’s updated and loops properly.

I know it’s technically correct, as I did change the loop points, but a bit counter-intuitive IMO.
If looping has been set, and once a selection is made, should it not follow that new selection until looping has been disabled?

What do you think?

That’s a one-shot command, not a checkbox. I think the intention is to decouple the loop region from the selection.
There are several bugs logged against the loop feature, and I don’t understand the thinking behind the new design, or what exactly the intended behaviour is.

It seems weird to me that if a loop region is set, and the cursor is before the loop region, starting loop play commences from the play position, not the start of the loop. Perhaps there is a use case for that, but I’ve no idea what it is. On the other hand, it may be a bug. As there is no documentation about this, we can only guess.

Perhaps one of the devs will add to this thread as to what the goal was.

To be fair to the devs though, Audacity is in need of updating and full marks to them for starting to implement them.
However, since a large part of Audacity’s code base must be pretty dated, any changes, no matter how trivial they may seem,
has a good change of inadvertently adding bugs.

I use looping in conjunction with tempo changes to learn complex guitar riffs from recorded songs. The new looping feature makes that process far too complicated. My preference would be to simply have a looped-play button along side the normal play button - so the process would be select a section, change the tempo, and then hit the loop-play button. Now, every time I alter the selection I have to remember to click another button (“set loop to selection”), and then hit play. If shorten or lengthen the selected section, the loop-selection doesn’t track those changes. Same is true I change the tempo again (on the same selected section) the loop-selection doesn’t track those changes (although the non-loop selection does) so I have to once again hit the “set loop to selection” button.

I use looping to help with language learning.
It used to be possible, with a simple key combination, to loop a selected section of audio, then to quickly select and loop the next section.

To do this seems much more clunky now, far less intuitive and user friendly. Has anyone found a solution yet to this issue? Or know of an alternative to audacity which would allow me to do this?

Edited to add: I have just installed Ocenaudio and it does the job perfectly.

I have read the earlier posts in this topic, because I interested to see how things work and how problems are solved and learn a wee bit at the same time…but I am confused as to what actually is not working.
When looping, you can “select as section” … then “set loop to seleection” and markers appear in the timeline. If you want change the length of the loop, hover mouse pointer over the markers and when pointer changes to “two arrows” drag it to new position …anywhere. Click anywhere on the track and then “play” and play starts from curser and when it comes to loop markers it will repeat the loop bit. You do not need a selection “selected” on the track… it obeys the time line markers. Right click the timeline and get context menu and make setting here. “Loop on/off,”, “Clear Loop”, “set loop to selection”. … Is this not the type thing you are trying to do…???

That does work, thank you! But it still doesn’t feel as quick and easy as previously, I listen to segments of 2-3 seconds at a time and i think it was just easier and quicker to do as a selection rather than moving the two markers.

I realise that this is not what audacity was designed for, so understand that the developers probably have other priorities.

One advantage I see is the loop always stays in the timeline until cleared, so you can Zoom in and move the curser to anywhere to see some other part and come easily back to the orig. loop. Before if you accidently clicked somewhere the selection was de-selected and you lost the loop position.
also…setting loop now is just a matter of dragging in the timeline and the markers appear.