Re: [Audacity-devel] Copy-Paste with multiple audio and label tracks

[Al D. <bus...@gm...>]

On Wednesday 04 November 2009 00:04:48 Gale Andrews wrote:
> | From James Crook <cr...@in...>
> | Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:09:23 +0000
> | Subject: [Audacity-devel] Copy-Paste with multiple audio and
> | label tracks
> |
> > Al Dimond wrote:
> > > I've been thinking about schemes to improve the behavior of
> > > Paste when the clipboard tracks don't line up perfectly with
> > > target tracks... if you have ideas about what correct behavior
> > > should be let me hear 'em!
> >
> > For 2.0 we can ignore 'linking on' and have the rule that we
> > treat the tracks of each kind separately, and if there are more
> > tracks than we are pasting do nothing to the extra tracks and if
> > fewer don't paste everything and don't create new tracks (which
> > is what I believe Audacity currently does for n audio tracks).
> 
> Pasting the first track when we "can't paste everything"  is "OK"
>  but not much more than that. It doesn't work well for me in that
>  labelled regions case where selecting none of the audio tracks
>  treats all of them as selected for the copy.
> 
> If the clipboard has contents that came from the track we're
>  pasting into, should pasting those contents be done rather than
>  slavishly pasting the first track irrespective? Might be something
>  for after 2.0 though.
> 

I'd rather leave the big part of this discussion for later, but I'd 
like to note that I like Copy and Paste to be essentially separated 
from eachother (communicating only through clipboard contents, which 
they handle essentially mechanically), and would rather have tracks 
pasted from the clipboard in the order copied (or, perhaps, in the 
order copied among track types).

Some of this is because I want OnPaste() to have a straightforward 
implementation, but I think a straightforward implementation has 
indirect benefits to the user -- the more we try to add intelligence to 
Paste in particular cases, the harder it becomes to correctly specify 
the behavior for all cases, the harder it is to describe it in the 
manual, and the harder it will be for users to discover its logic on 
their own.

I understand what you're saying about the labeled regions case, and I 
agree that pasting the audio from the matching track is ideal for that 
case.  But I wouldn't want to do that unless it fit into a logical 
scheme for pasting N clipboard tracks to M target tracks.  (Matching 
tracks is somewhat complicated by the fact that users could paste from 
different projects, and could change the order of tracks between a copy 
and a paste -- it's, again, not hard to deal with that in the case of 
pasting to a single track, but it is hard to figure out what to do 
pasting to multiple tracks).

 - Al