Selecting Audio - the basics

Peter 09May17: Current page title is a "working title" subject to change.

This is a landing page for the proposed Help button in the error message that the user gets if they try to apply an action that requires a selection with no selection extant. Just the bare minimum here, as users landing here want to get on with applying an effect. They can come back for more, once past that roadblock.

Therefore please do not extend this Page.

Gale: 09May17: Should this be part of Getting Started? If not perhaps Edit should link here? And no, per Audacity Selection, selecting or autoselecting the entire project is as important to know as selecting a regio (as you say later in the Intro, but contradict at the start). Your second sentence doesn't want "a region" in it, IMO.

• Peter 10May17: actually James and I have been discussing whether this page should just be a semi-orphan as a landing page for the proposed Help button for "no selection present" - or whether it would be better as the initial link from the front page entry in Using Audacity>Editing with Audacity. We find ourselves favouring the latter as the full page is more than a bit intimidating tending to TL;DR.

  But you raise a good point here Gale. It certainly would make a better newbie "getting started" page linked to from Edit which is part the "getting started" suite of pages. The question remains: do we also want a separate link to this page from Getting Started - and I don't see why not.

  • Gale 11May17: I see two options. a) Link to here from Using Audacity, or b) make this page part of Getting Started, and Using Audacity still links to Audacity Selection. I like the idea of b). If users don't know how to Select All or partially select, that is unlikely to be the only thing they don't understand. With b) they are already inside the noob docs.
    • Peter 11May17: Good counsel Gale - that's what I've done.
• Peter 10May17: It also begs a further question. There are many places in the Manual that talk about "selection" and link to Selecting Audio, do we want to retain those linking to the detailed page or do we think it better to send them to this simpler new page?
  • Gale 11May17: It might depend on individual cases, but I think most pages should still link to Audacity Selection. The top of it has been somewhat demystified.
    • Peter 11May17: Yeah, I'm thinking that way too now. I like the idea of restricting the cut-down Selection 101 page being part of the noob section "Getting Started" - with the detailed page for non-noobs.

This page explains only the basics of selecting audio for typical Audacity use. This involves either:

• selecting or autoselecting the entire project, or
• mouse selecting only a region of audio in one or more tracks.

Once all or a region is selected, you can then change that selection's sound with an effect. Another common action is to delete or move the region of audio.

Selecting a region using the mouse

The easiest way to select a region of audio is to click the left mouse button anywhere inside of an audio track, then drag (in either direction) until the other edge of your selection is made, then release the mouse.

If Selection tool is not selected (default setting), choose from Tools Toolbar, below:

Selecting the entire project

Peter 11May17: note to Gale: reverting the "Ctrl +A" shortcut to "CTRL + A" as Connie (implicitly) favours such capitalization.

• Gale 14May17: Connie may be outdated. We are using the Commands page now, which uses sentence case. As I said I do not oppose sentence case for shortcuts, and I think you argued for it before. It's your decision on that, but either Commands must change to upper case, or the existing shortcuts already used on pages must change to sentence case. I can imagine changing Commands is much less work (I thought James could do that in his scripts).
  • Peter 16May17: We should be able to do this using the text change tool (used with care). I do actually personally prefer sentence case "Ctrl + A" and "Command", I was merely following Connie's direction.

    If you agree Gale, I'll get Connie to Change her mind.

You can select the entire length of all tracks on screen with Select > All or use the shortcut CTRL + A (or COMMAND + A on a Mac). }}

James 11May17: No need to mention auto selection in the 'basics'. Noobs will in any case be confused by having to learn what preferences are. They can do all that they need with the two methods given above.

Automatic Select All, if none selected

There is a setting in Tracks Behaviors Preferences called "Select all then act on entire project, if no audio selected" that auto-selects the entire project (whenever you issue an editing command that depends on a selection) if you have made no explicit time selection.

If this preference is unchecked, all menu items and buttons requiring an audio selection will remain grayed out until audio is selected.

Gale 11May17: Regardless of James's ednote below, that is not fully true. RTP effects will not be grayed out.

James 10May17: ToDo-1 The above sentence will need to change. I'm expecting that we will have a choice of three options for 'Handling of effects when no audio selected:' (1) Grey out (2) Select automatically (3) Warn/Explain. 3 would be the default as being most suitable for newbies. 2 I think is not necessary, but I hear the argument that we should have it. 1 is probably what I would use myself. Am open to better designs and clearer shorter wording.

• Gale 11May17: So now we are adding more complexity that isn't in the Proposal, or rather we now admit the warning is a nuisance for forgetful/careless advanced users as well as the most clueless noobs.

  The new three option suggestion confuses me. Why is it confined to effects? Are we not going to warn for edits like cut and copy, despite we say at the top of this page that edits are a reason for selecting a region?

  Can we please understand once and for all that 3) is not the most useful option for the worst type of noobs that forced us to enable autoselection in the first place. I do not state this for fun. Turning off autoselection by default (necessary for this Proposal) is a considerable risk for user support. This is a highly reasonable assumption based on prior experience. This is why we have to tread so carefully with the dialogue that links to this page. At the moment it reads like "up you" to grandad who is struggling to read an outdated and incorrect USB product manual. If we fall over ourselves to be friendly/persuasive in this dialogue, and point out there that autoselection is an option (for the sake of more advanced users too) we "might" just have something that is not worse or a possible improvement, rather than a potential disaster. Persuasive does not have to mean verbose. I remain very open to discuss this dialogue.

  • Peter 11May17: Most of us (among those who are interested in this topic) fundamentally believe that 3) popping an error/warning is the best option, certainly for noobs as it attempts to educate them, rather than hand-holding them in their naïveté and in the process prolonging their ignorance with regard to selection. Similarly most of us believe that autoselection is really an advanced option for use by those who know what they are doing.

    And note that we were not "forced" to use autoselect to address this problem - rather a developer chose to do it that way - and chose not to pop an error/warning message, which is normally the Audacity way, where we don't try to guess or interpolate what the user means. I give you two use cases from the Audacity UI

    1) If a user naïvely tries to open an Audacity Project by using File>Import>Audio, we don't silently assume that they really meant to use File>Open - rather we pop them an educative error message.

    2) Nor with "Error not well-formed (invalid token) at line x" do we try to strip out any problematic special characters - once again we pop an error message (though I find this one not particularly educative).

    BTW if we really wanted to look after the grandad user of a USB TT with an out-of-date incorrect manufacturer's manual we would turn on "Software Playthrough" by default. Ten years ago I was one of those such grandads - and I fell into that bear-trap, that was what brought me to the Forum in the first place - and you put me right, back then Gale.

  • Gale 14May17: Paul and Darrell are not yet persuaded of the need for an educational dialogue. Now the disagreement is over whether autoselect is an advanced option or not. I argue it is not. It has been default "on" for years and has saved thousands of support requests, to judge by what happened before autoselect. I was around then, unlike Peter, and at that time we thought providing a dialogue might not reduce the problem enough.

    Clearly autoselect is suitable for noobs. James has improved it, and we have refrained from giving it behaviour options so that it will not be too hard for noobs to switch it on. If we want the James/Peter educational dialogue, we need to make autoselect easy to find if the noob clicks Help in that dialog. Confining autoselect to Audacity Selection will make it too hard for the noob to find. It will also mean I support Paul's dialog instead that directly enables autosave.

    I strongly suggest Peter considers reinstating autoselect here, because I think the James/Peter educational dialogue in the very brief alternatives I have suggested is ATM easier to grasp than Paul's suggested dialog. Arguably the James/Peter dialog serves the purpose more directly (to the extent we need to help the five or so users a month who say they don't know how to make partial selections).

    The whole thing turns on the support impact. If we satisfy the five users a month and then get 20 users a month who can't figure how to enable/re-enable autoselect (a very plausible scenario) we are demonstrably worse off than before. Remember, all we have to do is tell the noob who had autoselect on from previous Audacity to reset Preferences for some reason, and they will get this dialog instead of being able to carry on as before.

Selecting the whole of an individual track

The whole of an individual track can be selected by clicking in the Track Control Panel to the left of a track. Make sure that you click in a neutral area of the Track Control Panel, not inside one of the buttons or sliders.

Gale 14May17: Do we want the below sentence? We would have to mention clips, otherwise the text is incorrect.

An alternative way to select an entire track is to double-click inside it, provided you have not split the track into separate clips.

This page is only a brief summary of how to make selections in your project. For further details and visual examples please see the Selecting Audio page.

|< Back to: Getting Started