Re: [Audacity-devel] active text track

[Al D. <bus...@gm...>]

On Friday, September 10, 2010 09:37:59 Tim-Christian Mundt wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> in order for others to make recording an event with audacity really
> simple, I created an empty standard project which gets copied for
> each event. It already contains a text track with a marker at
> 0:00:00 because we want to export the event to CD directly after
> the event. So far...
> 
> On my computer (audacity 1.3.11-beta) when I start recording and
> set a new text marker sometime, it will be added to the existing
> (active) text track. On another computer (I think it was with
> 1.3.9) audacity instead created a new text track resulting in
> missing the first part when exporting to multiple files. Well, I
> thought I was clever and did an upgrade to the new ubuntu version
> which however ships with 1.3.12 which shows the same behavior as
> the previous audacity version.
> 
> Can I influence how audacity behaves here?

No, there's no user preference.

> Making people click into
> the existing text track in order to activate it is just a silly
> instruction, it should be as simple as possible. (As it is the
> only track present, it should be active anyways.) 

The "active" track is an audio track; there is no concept of an active 
text track. Currently if you add a label while an audio track is 
active, Audacity searches downward for the first label track 
encountered. The reason it only searches down is because of how sync-
lock groups work -- it's something that is probably not important to 
you, but defining consistent sync-lock behavior is really important for 
the Audacity UI in general.

I can see that in your case it would be better for Audacity to use the 
existing Label Track. Unfortunately I don't know of a way to work that 
in to the existing scheme and keep it consistent with how sync-lock 
groups work. So you're probably best off putting the label track 
underneath the audio track. You can put both an audio track and a 
label track in your saved project, then use Append Record to record 
into the existing audio track. Append Record is available at least 
three ways: the Transport menu, its keyboard shortcut (listed in the 
menu), or by holding Shift and clicking the Record button.

> How comes the
> behavior is changing from version to version? Or is it due to some
> setting/circumstances on my computer?
> 

It's changing version to version because this is a development branch 
and that's what happens on development branches. It's only a problem 
because our release branch is so old that nobody uses or maintains it. 
We're working on that.

 - Al

> Thanks for any advice
> Tim
> 
> 
> 
> 
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