Re: [Audacity-devel] Assertion failure in WaveTrack::AppendAlias( )

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At 10:52 am -0700 3/5/02, Dominic Mazzoni wrote:
>When you save an Audacity project, say "song.aup", it creates
>a folder, "song_data", which contains the actual data related
>to the project.  If you throw away that folder, there's
>virtually nothing left of the project.

Nota Bene: If this is something that I have failled to read
in the docs, please refer me to that documentation. I will try to
catch up.

What I had done was to open a sound 'movie' (previously created
in quicktime by saving a CD track) of 7 minutes and 52 seconds
and 20 framews of the Tallis Scholars singing the Gloria from the
Westerm Wind Mass by John Taverner
<URL: http://www.gimell.com/Database/ReleaseNotes/027notes.html >
When I saved this as a project, it saved the aup file next
to the movie file, and I assumed that the aup file contained
pointers into that file.

(BTW Audacity does not claim to able to open movies).

I have discovered that it also created a folder in the same folder
as the application, called 'Track  1 Movie_data'. In fact this only
contained about 1.2 MByte of data.

I would suggest that the saving of user files in the same directory
as the application is something that ought to be looked at most carefully.
Apart from immediately leading to at least some confusion in the users'
minds as to what can safely be deleted by whom, it becomes next to impossible
to run the application from read-only media, and difficult in the extreme
to copy a project to another disk (exempli gratia a removable
disk or a CD) to either archive as a work in progress or to take
to either another machine or another geographical location; or
to move the application.

I can't help but think that other developers in other fields have
considered the project-based format, and it would seem to me that the
end-user ought to have control only of the location and name of the
directory in which the project is stored. That directory should have a
file, possibly one file only, whose name is stereotyped to greater
or lesser degree ('index.html' might do), and a folder called
'Media' which will contain the media for the project.

>The main reason it needs to have a whole folder is so that
>it can support cut&paste and undo in reasonable time.

I can't imagine that any of us would have a problem with that.

>In theory, I'd like to try to have Audacity save projects in
>single files, but in practice, it would be very difficult to
>do that efficiently, and it would be far more complicated than
>the current method.

Perhaps you might only want to do this for projects that are in a
stable state, such as just started, or at a milestone or effectively
completed. This operation could be known as 'solidifying',
'freezing' or 'compacting' and would result in a read-only
single file copy, rather like a database file. If it were needed
again, opening would imply 'reforming', 'melting' or more
prosaically 'unpacking' into the directory form again. One
can get a similar effect by piping through tar or zip. A useful
by-product is that one gets to name the wrapper file, exempli gratia
'Demo 2002-05-04.tgz'

>The most important code that should be written, I think, is
>when a WaveTrack is loading itself from a project, it should
>tell the user if it can't find a particular file, and then
>give them an opportunity to search for it.

O.K. So if a file called 'b00000.auf' cannot be opened at the
location it was last known then Audacity should pop up a file
selector saying: Please locate 'b00000.auf' ...

BTW When I run iCAB version 2.71 <URL: http://www.icab.de/ > at
the same time as Audacity there appears to be severe competition for
interrupts, and eventually the mouse pointer freezes and it is not
possible to enter a debugger using the NMI. I am not even suggesting
that this is a problem with Audacity - it could be something in the
wxWIndows library - and it does not happen with Mozilla
<URL: http://www.mozilla.org/ > anyway.

Also the volume control has what I call the Queen Boadicea
problem. You signal it to go right, and it moves to the
left. All the controls flash too much as they are drawn, and
I found it a problem that the quiescent (but enabled) transport
buttons were not coloured. At the very least the record button
should be red (but should also be labelled as colour is
insufficient HCI), and arguably should be adjacent to the
Play button.

Whilst I realise that open source software has no reason to
'follow tail-lights', it might still be an idea to base the
'look and feel' on the best ideas that are already
established. In this case, I would point to Reason from
Propellerhead <URL: http://www.propellerheads.se/ > partly
because this product is often marked as being the best of
actually quite a number of really high quality music
applications, and partly because I spent a long time with a
gentleman from that company last Tuesday, who had much to
say about the success of Reason, and quite spontaneously
recommended me to use Audacity for a vinyl project that I
have coming up. Even if you think that Audacity has some way
to go before it is 'ready', or has many bugs, the word 'out
there' is that it coming on pretty quickly.

Ben.

Wish List

a) It should be possible to do a 'Get Info' on a track.
b) The time scale should be in minutes/seconds rather
than fractional minutes
c) Perhaps a mute button next to the master volume and/or
blinking lghts.
d) It should be possible to fill a track with something
other than silence (like the cloud/fractal filters in
the Gimp) exempli gratia
<URL: http://www.penguinmagazine.com/Reference/gnome/gimp-manual-1.0.0/Plugin_render.html >, even noise - white noise or pink noise would
do, but perhaps best would be a bold theme, signature or
ident, just 4 or five notes ia all that is needed. Latex does this.