Re: [Audacity-quality] select behavior weird?

[Gale A. <ga...@au...>]

| From Vaughan Johnson <va...@au...> 
| Sat, 07 Aug 2010 18:16:49 -0700
| Subject: [Audacity-quality] select behavior weird?
> > Vaughan Johnson wrote:
> > So, the most salient thing now is, you [Al] say "A track group can have no
> > label tracks..." but then it's always ever one group, and visually
> > indicates otherwise. So for a quick fix, if there are zero LabelTracks,
> > I think the Sticky button (!) should be ignored.
> > 
> > And for some later iteration (Audacity 3.0!), we should have real groups
> > not indicated just by position of LabelTracks.
>
> ..or if Sticky is the mode, why should track selection visually
> conflict with grouped-ness?
> 
> For example:
> 
> WaveTrack WTa1
> WaveTrack WTa2
> LabelTrack LTa
> 
> WaveTrack WTb1
> LabelTrack LTb
> 
> If I select WTa2 (or a region of it), shouldn't WTa1 and LTa (or the
> corresponding regions) be selected, and especially highlighted as such,
> as that's really the case?

I don't have too much problem with what we have now, even if I may not 
agree with every detail. If the "Link Tracks" button is on, the audio tracks 
are "linked" or better, "synchronised". It says nothing about label or 
other tracks that there may be, where we decide if they are included in the
synchronisation or not.  

I'd prefer there was one term here for the user (not "link(ed)" in one 
place and "sync-selected" in the Select menu), but that's another story.

I think Vaughan's example does highlight the danger that if audio tracks 
with no label track are a group, users may well think that WTa1 and LTa 
should also be selected if you select WTa2. They shouldn't, because if I 
amplify, they won't be affected.  The difficulty IMO is only in getting 
across clearly when other tracks are affected and when they are not. My 
understanding is that other tracks are affected when not to do so would 
leave one track out of synchronisation with another.   

I feel another problem is that this more general usage of linking means 
(as now) we probably shouldn't have linking "on" in an initialised cfg.
I feel that's a bit of a shame, because labels are much more useful when 
linking is on, yet it will be harder to discover. 

So for future Audacity, being able to define (not necessarily consecutive 
groups) other than by labels would I think be good. I don't think for now
we should force people who want linking to add a label track if they don't 
need one.  





Gale