Until you get the hang of it, selecting audio can seem daunting. I hope
the following explanation translates to reality. If some of it is
already familiar, just mutter, "I already know that," and read on.
Pressing shift-a stops playback at that point and puts the cursor at
that position. Alternatively, pressing left bracket when playing puts
the cursor at that position but the file keeps playing. One option,
then, is to hit left bracket at the point where you want selection to
start while playing and then pressing right bracket at the point where
you want selection to end. Then press spacebar to stop playing.
Another pres of spacebar will play the selection.
That works well (a) if you have good reflexes and (b) if what you want
to select isn't too lengthy.
Vojta mentioned the dialog that appears when pressing left bracket while
not playing. That allows you to adjust the start point of the
selection. If you have time selection to hours, minutes, seconds and
milliseconds, you can adjust by tiny increments. Pressing right bracket
brings up a similar dialog that allows you to adjust the end point.
If you have selected some audio in order to delete it, pressing c is
useful. It plays before and after the selection so you can decide
whether your start and end points are exactly where you want them.
Version 2.1.1 also introduced a splendid facility:
Shift-f4 plays up to the start of the selection
Shift f5 plays a short passage from the start of the selection
Shift-f6 plays up to the end of the selection
Shift-f7 plays a short passage after the selection
Those commands provide a better idea of exactly where the selection
starts and ends. In the case of a lengthy selection, they also allow
easy adjustment of the end point.
Instead of pressing left and right bracket to set start and end points,
you can use the selection toolbar - control-f6 for Windows and
Command-f6 (pretty sure that's right) for Mac. I used to use that quite
a lot, but find the brackets good most of the time.
Remember not to use shift-a once you have set your selection until you
have done what you set out to do with it. That will reset the beginning
of your selection, causing you to say unpleasant things. Audacity is not
like some other software where it is possible to set beginning and end
points and still play anywhere in the file.
The final word, practise and ask questions if confused.
Andrew
On 31/10/2015 9:24 AM, Maria Chapman wrote:
HI. I would also like to know more about selecting audio. I can select from
somewhere to the end or the start but am not sure how to do it in the middle.
Running the latest audacity on a mac.
thanks.
Maria
On 31 Oct 2015, at 4:27 am, Vojtěch Polášek<krecoun@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:The audacity4blind web site is at
Greetings,
I thought I know how to work with Audacity, but I was probably wrong :-D
I want to do it like in Soundforge. Play sound, find my position, stop
there with shift+A, finetune the position, press "mark start at the
cursor", find my end of the selection, press "mark end at the cursor"
and do whatever I want with the selection.
But I found out that this procedure works only when I leave sound playing.
If I stop and press the [ key, I am presented with the dialog. If I
press OK, and Space to play further, nothing is played. I would expect
that I have set the start position of the selection and I should be able
to play further to set the end of the selection.
What am I doing wrong?
I am running Audacity 2.1.0 on Arch Linux.
Thanks,
Vojta
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