Re: [Audacity-devel] RFE: Audacity project file concept
A free multi-track audio editor and recorder
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From: Dominic M. <do...@mi...> - 2003-09-28 18:41:34
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Otto, I agree that there are some things we could do to improve the handling of projects. Letting the user find a project folder would definitely help. We have investigated trying to store a project in a single archive, but there are some very good reasons why it would not be practical: 1. Audacity is able to do nonlinear edits like cut, copy, paste, duplicate, etc. because it breaks the audio into chunks. When you cut, for example, only the chunks near the cut point need to be modified on disk; everything both in and out of the cut stays the same. Compare this to something like CoolEdit, where if you cut 1 second out of the middle of a 15 minute song, you have to wait 45 seconds while CoolEdit rewrites the entire WAV file to disk with that 1 second missing. 2. We could package up a project file and its directory into an archive when you save, and then uncompress it when you open. The main problem again is speed: a lot of people like the idea that you can open a large project quickly, and not sit there waiting for 10 minutes while it loads everything. Saving would also take a really long time - enough to really annoy people. I am interested in the idea of adding a function to package a project into a single file, but I think it should be an explicit step, not something automatic, since there's no way it could be fast. - Dominic Otto Wyss wrote: > The current structure of the .aup files and its corresponding folder > isn't very good. A file/folder may not be renamed, files within the > folder may get lost, navigating in the explorer is awkward because you > have to avoid moving into an aup-folder. My suggestion: > > Instead of a separate folder all the files are stored within an archive. > This archive could be a simple tar archive or similar. That way the user > just sees a single file, he can do any normal action like rename. The > filename hasn't do be stored inside the aup file since the archive keeps > them together. During processing the archive may be extracted into any > temporary location, depending if necessary by the operation. > > Okay it's probably not the right time to change anything before release > but IMO the aup file has to be redesigned right afterwards. To discuss > this now may allow for any precaution which might be necessary to allow > for such a step. > > O. Wyss > |