Re: [Audacity-quality] Importing multiple MP3 files with FFMpeg

[Richard A. <ri...@au...>]

On Wed, 2010-03-03 at 21:34 +0300, LRN wrote:
> >> Users would (reasonably) expect Audacity to "just open the goddamn file"
> >> the best way it could, without having to decide which importer to use
> >> (implying that when there is a choice, the developers can choose the
> >> best option and implement it, instead of implementing both and giving
> >> the choice to users).

> I'm still thinking that this trick theatens to traumatize typical (7
> t-words (8 with "to") in a row! Hight score!) users, we need different
> solution. Can you ask the users? What do they want?
> You can make a poll, like this:
> a) Dedicated preferences section that deals with import filter priority.
> b) Same as (a), but different priority can be assigned to different
> extensions (that is, you can have all your WAVs imported by libavcodec,
> while AIFFs will be opened by libsndfile).
> c) Same as (a), but without UI (can be accessed only by tweaking ini-file).
> d) Use LastOpenType. Count canceled OpenFileDialog as valid when a
> filter was switched in it.
> e) Use LastOpenType. Ignore filter switches made in canceled OpenFileDialog.
> f) Ask user for a filter each time file(s) is(are) dropped on Audacity.
> Remember filters used for files in Recent Files list (don't ask for a
> filter).
> g) Same as (f), but LastOpenType is the filter selected by default when
> a dialog asking for filter is shown.
> h) Something else.

I don't like the current hack of changing the files-of-type selection to
affect the import filter (and it only works patchily - you can't use it
to prefer flac-via-libsndfile to flac-via-libflac for instance, if your
libsndfile support flac files). I'd quite happily junk it if there was a
better option to control imports.

On that basis I favour option (a) over all the others. Essentially, what
this is is a GUI to allow the list of importers (which already exists
internally) to be re-sorted. I don't favour (b) not because it wouldn't
be nice to have, but because it is based on the idea that file
extensions describe mime types, which they don't, and has a lot of
pitfalls.

It's also a fair bit easier to implement if we only have a mechanism for
ordering a single, global, importer list rather than an infinite number
of lists for each possible file extension (and what about AIFF vs
aiff?).

So although it isn't the simplest thing to do, I would much prefer to
strip out the hacks around the last used filter, and store a list of
importers (need to think about the names used, which should be
untranslated) in the preferences which the user can re-order in a list
(hopefully there is a wx control for this kind of thing). This will also
fix other minor niggles for me, and I think is a good compromise between
flexibility and automation - we should set the default order to be the
one that is currently hard-coded, which normally works reasonably well,
and users can change it if they disagree (and it stays changed, once
they've decided they want libmad behind ffmpeg or whatever, even if they
then need to import a WAV file).

Richard