Sat Oct 09, 2021 6:20 am
Thanks Andrew – I’m about to click on the link to follow this up. There’s no doubt that Audacity is an excellent free program, but some aspects of it are maddeningly unintuitive. It took me ages to discover that in order to select something, I had to click INSIDE the waveform boxes. A friend who was an IT lecturer at university level, has a science degree, an arts degree and a doctorate, had exactly the same problem. It was a relief to know that I wasn’t being unusually stupid! This never gets explained in tutorials because people assume it’s obvious – it isn’t!
When I was trying to remove silence from the end of a recording, I expected the “timeline” to shorten accordingly, but it stays the same. As explained above, I had to save the file then open it in VLC to discover that the silent section had indeed been completely removed from the end.
Another problem is that updates can alter something fundamental, so older instructions on the internet no longer work. To change from the default linear display to one in dB one now has to click in the box with those numbers; apparently that’s a change from earlier versions.
On a related topic: I recently bought a Google phone, and was surprised that the plug on the supplied charger would not fit standard UK mains sockets. It took a lot of searching on the internet to discover that the earth lug has first to be pulled UP – then it fits perfectly. A simple diagram in the box would have saved a lot of frustration.