Reverting to earlier version

[jethroburns]

Help please. I updated my version of Audacity yesterday and I find the new version terribly confusing. Whereas before I used to have to outline items (turn them grey) to work on them, everything is grey now and when I highlight them they turn white. When click the record button to overdub it just carried on recording on the same track. I have to use a couple of keys to get it to overdub. Most confusing of alll is when I click "solo" to hear just one track, as soon as I turn it off everything is turned on (including items that I muted rather than deleting them).

So is there a way of returning to my earlier version?

Anton

[waxcylinder]

Whereas before I used to have to outline items (turn them grey) to work on them, everything is grey now and when I highlight them they turn white.

If you prefer the older traditional Audacity appearance, just go to Edit>Preferences and select the Interface tab.

And there click on the Theme dropdown and select Classic.

When click the record button to overdub it just carried on recording on the same track. I have to use a couple of keys to get it to overdub.

We turned this (default) behavior around a couple of releases ago as it was confusing a lot of users when record always started a new track.

If you want to rever to the old behavior, just go to Edit>Preferences and select the Recording tab.

On that dialog pane check on the "Always record on a new track"

Most confusing of alll is when I click "solo" to hear just one track, as soon as I turn it off everything is turned on (including items that I muted rather than deleting them).

I'm no expert on Solo and Mute as I rarely use those functions - I do recall that we "simplified" the default behavior a while back - and there is another more complex setting that may suit you

See: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tra ... ences.html

I suspect you want the Multi-track option.

This, more complicated, setting was the default in earlier versions of Audacity.

WC

[waxcylinder]

And with those three preferences changes you should find Audacity looking and behaving as you are used to.

With no need to revert to an earlier version (doing so would lose the advantage of the many bug-fixes).

WC

[jethroburns]

Thanks very much for all your answers.
One last question. I came back to this forum to see if there were any replies and could not see any so had go through my history to find my post and your answers. Is there a simpler way of doing this?

Anton

[waxcylinder]

At the bottom of the thread there is a "Subscribe topic" button for the particular thread - click on that and you will get email notifications of updates to the thread.

WC

[jethroburns]

Thank you so much everyone. I tried out all your recommendations and it now works fine. Yesterday evening I was in despair, as I could not understand what was going on.
The solo button is particularly useful when do vocal harmonises, ...

Best regards,

Anton

[waxcylinder]

What we've tried to do in recent releases is to make things simpler and more straightforward for the naive or infrequent user.

This has meant in many cases "hiding away" older more complex behaviors in user-settable preferences.

We are currently working on a plan to remove several bear traps that we know about in the app that catch folk out.

We've fixed on of them for the upcoming 2.2.2 release, relating to vertical zoom that a lot of folk got stuck in:
https://alphamanual.audacityteam.org/ma ... ease#vzoom

This change will turn that off by default - but it can be re-enabled.


This is the bear-trap planning page on our Wiki: https://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/ToDo ... _a_Mode%27

WC

[jethroburns]

Well, I am a naive but frequent user, using it to producer multitrack recordings of my music. But I tend to panic when things change out of my comfort zone.

Anton