Boundary Snap Guides

Peter 14Apr13: This page has been created from the material that was previously a section in Audacity Selection.

• ToDo-2 Ready for editorial review and merciless editing
  • Peter 14Apr13: I note that we need to make clear on this page the distinction between "Snap-to" and these "Snap-to Guides". This is because we have created confusion by giving these, two distinct (albeit mildly related) pieces of functionality, names that are too similar. Is there any chance that we could consider renaming "Snap-to Guides" to something more distinct from "Snap-to" or is the nomenclature set in stone.

Audacity makes it really easy to make a selection that starts or ends at a physical boundary, like a label or clip boundary.
Whenever snapping is taking place, a yellow vertical line appears to indicate snapping is taking place.

When you take any of the following actions:

• Creating a selection with the mouse
• Modifying the selection boundaries
• Sliding / time-shifting a clip

then the selection boundaries or the boundaries of the clip you're time-shifting will snap to the following locations:

• The start or end of any track or clip
• The start or end of any label
• Time zero (0 on the Timeline)

Gale 15Apr13: ToDo-1 we don't mention that you can click close to a boundary e.g. above a label in the waveform and snap to it. No selection involved, but you would almost always do that because you wanted to create a selection starting from there.

In the image below, we're dragging a clip in the "Guest" track leftwards with the mouse. When the clip reaches the right-hand boundary of the clip above it, a yellow vertical guide line appears showing the position of the snap boundary through all the tracks. Now that the guide line has appeared, we can release the mouse and the dragged clip will be perfectly aligned with the one above:

A Snap-to Guide appears (the vertical yellow line) when the selection has snapped to the start or end of an audio clip from any of the tracks.

If there are two boundaries very close to one another and it is not obvious which one is better, Audacity will not snap to either. If you want to snap to one of them, zoom in so that you can clearly position the mouse closer to one rather than the other.

Note carefully that Snap-to Guides are distinct from the "Snap To" checkbox in Selection Toolbar which snaps selection edges (or the cursor) to a chosen unit of time.