Menu Bar
Select
The Select menu — commands for selecting audio, tracks and regions, plus looping and zero-crossing tools.
The Select menu gathers everything to do with choosing what your next edit or effect will apply to: selecting all audio or all tracks, clearing the selection, extending a selection relative to the playback position, and managing the loop region.
Most editing commands and effects act on the current selection, so these commands are the usual first step of an edit.
Select all
Selects all the audio in the project — every track, from start to end. Use
it before an edit or effect that should apply to everything at once.
Shortcut:
Clear selection
Clears the current selection entirely: the time range, any selected clips, and any selected tracks. Nothing is deleted — the audio stays where it is, it just stops being selected.
Select all tracks
Selects every track in the project. Unlike
Select all, which selects a
time range across all audio, this selects the tracks themselves — useful for
track-level operations. Shortcut:
Region
The Region submenu builds a time selection from reference points you already have: the playback position, the start of the track’s audio, or its end. Instead of dragging a selection by hand, you pick the region you mean and Audacity sets the selection’s start and end for you.
Left of playback position
Selects a region that ends at the current playback position. A small Playback position dialog asks for a time; the selection then runs from that time up to the playback position. If the time you enter is at or after the playback position, nothing is selected. Shortcut:
Right of playback position
Selects a region that starts at the current playback position. A small Playback position dialog asks for a time; the selection then runs from the playback position up to that time. If the time you enter is at or before the playback position, nothing is selected. Shortcut:
The end time is capped at twice the project’s current length, so you cannot select an arbitrarily long stretch of empty timeline.
Track start to cursor
Selects from the start of the audio on the selected tracks up to the
playback position. If no track content is selected, the selection starts
from time zero instead. Shortcut:
Cursor to track end
Selects from the playback position to the end of the audio on the selected
tracks. If no track content is selected, it falls back to selecting from
the track start to the cursor instead — the same behaviour as
Track start to cursor.
Shortcut:
Track start to end
Selects the whole extent of the audio on the selected tracks — from where their leftmost audio starts to where their rightmost audio ends. It needs track content to be selected first; with nothing selected, it does nothing.
Audio clips
Not yet enabled in the current Audacity 4 alpha.
The Audio clips submenu will hold selection commands that work in terms of clips rather than times: extending the selection to the previous or next clip boundary, and selecting the previous or next clip outright. The submenu is present in the menu but greyed out in this alpha.
Spectral
Not yet enabled in the current Audacity 4 alpha.
The Spectral submenu will hold the toggle for spectral selection — selecting a frequency range as well as a time range, so edits can target part of the spectrum rather than the whole waveform. The submenu is present in the menu but greyed out in this alpha.
Looping
The Looping submenu manages the loop region — the stretch of the timeline that playback repeats while looping is on.
Toggle loop region
Turns looping on or off. Turning it off leaves the region defined but
inactive. Shortcut:
The loop toggle is also a button in the transport group of the toolbar — see Toggle loop region.
Clear loop region
Removes the loop region entirely. Shortcut:
Set loop region to selection
Sets the loop region to the current time selection. With no time selection, it uses the extent of the selected clips instead; with nothing selected at all, the loop region is cleared. Shortcut:
Set loop region in/out
Opens a Set looping region in/out dialog where you type the start and
end times directly. Shortcut:
Move cursor to closest zero crossing
Moves the playback cursor to the nearest zero crossing — a point where the waveform passes through zero amplitude. Cutting or joining audio at a zero crossing avoids the click you can get when an edit lands mid-wave. Shortcut:
It moves the cursor without starting playback.
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