Re: [Audacity-devel] UI for grouping label/wave tracks

[Mark D <ma...@gm...>]

On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 4:01 PM, Gale Andrews <ga...@au...> wrote:

>
> | From "Mark D" <ma...@gm...>
> | Sun, 11 May 2008 14:49:37 -0400
> | Subject: [Audacity-devel] UI for grouping label/wave tracks
> |  > On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 2:17 PM, Gale Andrews <ga...@au...>
> wrote:
> > >  I have not been following this much, so can you remind me what
> > >  happens for the simple case where I have one audio track and
> > >  then decide to add a label. Will the labels move/edit with my
> > >  audio track automatically, or not until I explicitly link the audio
> > >  track with the generated label track?
> > >
> >
> > The labels don't move automatically, they have to be linked.
>
> Is there any way to turn the linking on automatically, once there
> is one audio track and one label track (only) present? Wouldn't this
> be much more useful in the above situation than having linking off
> by default? You can still go to the audio track menu and turn the
> linking off. Either way, if you add a second audio track, then you
> do have to explicitly link that new track to a label track if you want
> to do that (this assumes this is more useful than having the new
> audio track associate at once with the only existing label track).


> If you've already added a second label track, then you do have to
> choose to link your new second audio track to one of the label
> tracks.
>
> I appreciate this is making it more complex, but given the
> generally greater usefulness of linking than not, and assuming
> more people work with single tracks than not, I think it's worth
> considering at some stage of this work.
>

I think that's a good idea. I figure we check how many wave/label tracks
are, and if there's one of each, we would treat them as linked. But I'm
thinking stereo might count as two mono tracks, since I've run into this
behaviour already. I can't check right now since I'm not at my computer, but
I'll look into it tomorrow.


>
> > >  You mean click on the label track to be linked to? A sighted user
> > >  would be clicking on different audio tracks lots of times for other
> > >  reasons than associating a label track. Selecting association through
> > >  the label track seems more intuitive to me than doing so on the
> > >  audio track drop-down menu, but what happens if you have
> > >  multiple audio tracks - I think we are just associating with single
> > >  audio tracks? Either way, you could have the cascading menu/pop up
> > >  box coming out of the label track drop-down menu couldn't you?
> >
> > Clicking on a track for the purpose of linking would have to be prefaced
> > by some other action, a menu selection or button.
> >
> > The reason why the linking is done through the audio track is so that a
> > single label track can be used for multiple audio tracks. For example,
> > two audio tracks could be linked to the same label track, useful so that
> > label tracks can be reused if there aren't overly many labels. I didn't
> > plan on linking multiple label tracks to the same audio track.
>
> I can't see any common use either for associating the same audio track
> to multiple label tracks.
>

Neither could I. It also forces you to hold a structure capable of storing
pointers to all those linked tracks, instead of just one pointer. The
reverse behaviour could be useful though.

Linking would still work if done through the label track (I think), it's
> just more complex to implement? So if I click in Label Track 1's menu,
> and check Audio Track 1, then click in Label Track 2's menu, I could
> check Audio Track 2, but Audio Track 1 would be greyed out. OTOH
> I could go back to Label Track 1's menu, and check Audio Track 2.
> To me, this makes it a bit easier to see what is going on.
>

Wouldn't this mean building a separate menu for each label track, though, so
that we'd be able to grey out the correct selections?

-- 
Mark