User:PeterSampson/Sand-Box

My experimentation page

Sand-Box for when I have to make tricksy edits.

Extending or contracting an existing selection

Once you have a selected time range you can move either edge of the selection so as to expand or contract the selected length, or you may want to expand the selection at one edge and contract it at the other so as to select a similar length in a slightly different place; Audacity offers multiple methods to facilitate this:

• Hover the mouse pointer near the edge of a selection, when you hover close enough to the edge the mouse pointer changes to a hand with pointing finger (indicating you can now click and drag the selection). Then click and drag with the mouse to move that edge of the selection.

You can turn off that feature if required; open the Preferences, then click on the Tracks tab, and uncheck "Enable dragging of left and right selection edges".

• Hold SHIFT while clicking near one of the edges of the selection to extend or contract the selection to the time point you clicked on.

You can also extend or contract an existing selection by holding down the SHIFT key while left-clicking the mouse. The nearest edge of the selection will jump to the current mouse pointer location. This is really useful if you know exactly what you want to select but it doesn't easily fit on the screen at once:

1. Click at one edge of the selection
2. Scroll until the other edge is in view
3. Shift-click to set the other edge of the selection.

• Hold SHIFT while pressing LEFT or RIGHT to extend the selection from the left or right edge respectively.
• Hold CTRL + SHIFT while pressing LEFT or RIGHT to contract the selection from the right or left edge respectively.
• Use Selection Toolbar to precisely place the selection edges by entering their time positions.

Gale 10Apr13: ToDo-2 Add description of using [ and ] to do this.

Mac users: remember to substitute the Command key for the Control key.

Including or excluding the existing time range in other tracks

You can also change which tracks are selected independently of the time range, so that selecting an extra track includes the selected range in that track, and deselecting a selected track moves the selected range out of that track. This gives you complete flexibility to extend, contract or move the existing time range up or down between multiple tracks.

To change which tracks are selected without affecting the time range, there are multiple methods.

• Hold SHIFT while clicking on the Track Control Panel to the left of the waveform to toggle its selectedness.
• Press UP or DOWN to change the focused track, then press Enter to toggle its selectedness.
• Hold SHIFT while pressing UP or DOWN to extend or contract the selection up or down into adjacent tracks.

Use the first two of the above methods when you want to select or deselect non-adjacent tracks.

Note that it is possible to have a time range selected but no tracks selected. In that case, you will only see the evidence of the selected time range in the Timeline.

Gale 02Mar13: ToDo-2 I think though we have to link to the Sync-Locked Tracks Group page here, to point out the advanced usage that you don't have to select all the tracks you want to affect.