Problem after 3.1 update

I’m VERY much an amateur so please bear with me. After running the last update I’m having problems with the audio trims I’m moving from Audacity. I don’t know if it was the update or if I pressed a key I didn’t realize. This is how I explained it to office colleagues:

So late last week, Norton Security told me that I needed to load updates to a few programs and Audacity was one of them. I did it and everything seemed ok at the time. This week I go into it and notice a change in some of the buttons, etc. but it looks more or less the same. So I trimmed the sermon out same as always but when I would play it on the site, there didn’t seem to be any sound. Repeated a few times and the same thing happened. Then I skipped it ahead and found that it appeared to be cutting the part out that I wanted and recording my selection , but must have kept the space open from the beginning of the tape to the start of my selection. It did cut AFTER my selection but kept the BEFORE as dead air. — you have to skip it ahead to hear it. The actual sermon kicks in at 13:24 into the blank part. Any ideas?

Sounds like the new non-destructive editing feature introduced in Audacity 3.1.x … https://youtu.be/HpA138b-J9s?t=67

One option is to revert back to an old version of Audacity … Old Audacity versions download

On 3.1.3, when trimming audio from either end of a clip, if you drag from anywhere in the top third, the cursor turns into a left-right arrow, and you will be doing a non-destructive trim.

When doing a non-destructive trim, the remaining audio retains its original time position, effectively replacing the trimmed audio with silence.

If you drag from anywhere in the bottom two-thirds, the cursor turns into a pointing finger, and you will be selecting OR DE-SELECTING audio. If you press the delete key at this point, the relevant audio is deleted.

If you do a destructive trim, the remaining audio shifts to the left, as it did before.