Continue Where We Pause in Audacity

mr-b wrote:RE: "Press P to pause, then click on the pause position before pressing Stop." how do you accurately click on the pause position?

If you have a wheel mouse, Ctrl+wheel to zoom in as close as you like.

mr-b wrote:it might just be enough to include a big click that wasn't there before!

I've tried many times to pause exactly when I hear a click, and I can't reliably get closer than 0.1 seconds - I'm sure it's my reactions at translating an audible click into a key press rather than anything that Audacity is doing. Mean reaction time to auditory stimulus is generally quoted as somewhere between 150 and 200 milliseconds, so I don't think that just using a pause button will be an accurate method for locating an exact point without using some other method to refine the result.

Whether or not this is a bug depends on whether or not it is doing what it was designed to do. If it was designed to be sample accurate, then yes it is an unexpected incorrect behaviour and would be classed as a bug. However, it it is designed to be accurate within a larger time frame (the largest discrepancy that I've observed is 1024 samples, which at a sample rate of 48 kHz is a shade over 21 milliseconds) then it may be a design limitation rather than a bug. Not being a programmer I've no idea how difficult it might be to make it sample accurate, but as a regular user of Audacity I don't see any compelling need why it would need to be any more accurate than that.

mr-b wrote:Also I had no idea that Audacity required such a keyboard-driven mode.

It doesn't
Almost everything can be done from the mouse, if that's the way you prefer to work. I used Audacity for several years without learning any keyboard shortcuts other than spacebar (start/stop) "P" (pause) and the usual Ctrl+C (copy) Ctrl+V (paste). It's only as I've used Audacity more that I've picked up many of the time saving keyboard short-cuts. With repetitive tasks in particular, using the keyboard can considerably speed things up, but they are by no means essential. The one thing that I would really not want to be without is a wheel mouse - I find that navigating along the time line, zoom in and zoom out are just so much quicker using the mouse wheel.

My apologies if I've over complicated things. It's just that with Audacity there are often several ways to accomplish the same task. You don't need to learn them all, just finding one way of doing something that suits the way that you work is enough. One of the strengths of Audacity is that almost everything can be achieved using either only the mouse or only the keyboard and this is especially valuable for many users that have disabilities (for example visually impaired users can usually not use a mouse).

mr-b wrote:click Pause button, then click 'Trim to End' button and I'm done.

Probably the easiest way to do that using the mouse is:
1) Click the Pause button
2) Click on the pause position in the track and drag to the end of the track
3) Click on the stop button
4) Edit menu > Delete

The trouble with that method is that it is not very accurate.
To select the start of the edit more accurately, zoom in while paused (either with Ctrl+mouse wheel or using the zoom buttons).
At the exact position that you require, click with the left moue button. This can be accurate to 1 sample.
After you have clicked on the track, click Stop (or press the space bar)
You now have some options to select up to the end of the track - you can zoom out again so that you can see the end of the track and press SHIFT+Click beyond the end of the track,
or just press SHIFT+END
Then press the DEL key, or select Delete from the Edit menu.

Perhaps someone else can come up with a simpler method - perhaps you will.

As with all programs there is a bit of a learning curve but it doesn't take long to become familiar. I hope you decide to stick with Audacity for a while - not that I have any vested interest, but because I think it is an excellent program and other than very simple, functionally limited programs (such as Windows Sound Recorder) I can't think of any other audio editing program that is easier to use.

connerpandfuldell.blogspot.com

Source: https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?t=33443

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