audacity / audacity/audacity

Return playhead to the start of a newly recorded section after stopping

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#12,088 1 comment 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub
Enhancement Request recording
Dominant language
C++
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

### Problem to be solved

In Audacity 4, when a recording is stopped, the playhead remains at the end of the newly recorded audio. In Audacity 3, stopping after recording returned the playhead to the point where that recording began. This made it possible to press Stop and then immediately press Play to review the take. The change adds an extra manual step to a very common voiceover and recording workflow.

### Your idea

Restore the previous behaviour, ideally as an optional preference such as “Return to recording start position on stop”. This would allow users to choose whether the playhead remains at the end of the recording or returns to where the recording began.

### Prior art

Audacity 3 provided similar behaviour, with the cursor remaining at the original starting position after stopping, allowing immediate replay from that point. There is also an existing Audacity 4 issue proposing configurable stop/cursor behaviour for playback (#10022).

### Additional context

This is particularly useful when recording voiceovers or repeated takes. After recording a sentence or section, the natural workflow is to stop and immediately listen back to what was just recorded. Returning the playhead to the recording start makes that a simple Stop → Play operation. In Audacity 4 I currently have to manually reposition the playhead after every take.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

The issue names no files, tests, or entry points. Compare Audacity 3 and Audacity 4 stop behavior, then trace the recording-stop and playhead handling; done means stopping a recording returns to its start, with the requested preference behavior defined and covered by tests.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
cpp
Domain
audio-video-rtc, desktop
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
52/100

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