Audacity "connects the dots" when you zoom in

[steve]

Rendering the samples with uneven spacing is inherently misrepresentative of the underlying data.

In the absence of sub-pixel rendering I don't see that we can get away from that "misrepresentation". What should we do if a sample value (amplitude) lies on a boundary between two pixels? The entire process of PCM digitization is about quantizing time/amplitude pairs.

[steve]

I've moved this discussion to the developer's mailing list, and there appears to be general agreement for adding stem plots as an option. I hope you (brian-armstrong) will join the discussion there and that we can introduce the feature in the next Audacity release, and progress / refine it as we go on.

There is a bug in the most recent pull request in that zooming in on the lower half of the waveform of a stereo track can cause the stems from the lower (right) channel to overflow into the upper (left) channel. I've fixed that, and added a setting in Preferences to enable the option, in this branch: https://github.com/SteveDaulton/audacity/tree/stem-plot . Your comments on my changes are very welcome (via the mailing list so that we don't have the confusion of parallel discussions).