If this preserves the timeline position of each clip this might be the best you can do.
Gale
Another terminology issue. I regard “editing” as “cut / copy / paste / delete” and so on. Things like noise reduction, amplifying, panning, filtering and so on, I refer to as “processing”.
If “editing”, the clip lengths are likely to change, which will mess up the blender project. If “processing”, avoiding any process that might change the length, and use WAV format only, you are in effect processing the clips “in place” with no risk of desynchronising your blender project.
I realise that you want to be able to move the entire audio part of the blender project into Audacity as an Audacity project, then move it back into blender, retaining the same clip/sound strip structure in both applications, but I don’t think that’s going to work because blender projects and Audacity projects are too different - not compatible. I think the best you will manage is to handle the “multi-clip project” in blender, and use Audacity to extend the audio processing capability - processing the audio files that are used in the blender project.
If you manage to get closer to your “ideal” process, I’d be interested to hear how.
Before I start re-inventing the wheel, would also like to know how this has progressed.
If you “Save Lossless Copy of Project” (File Menu: Save Project - Audacity Manual), you will have a project that references WAV files. Note that when you open the project again, Audacity creates a “normal” project (with “.AU” files), and the WAV files remain unaltered.
steve: I think that you referenced the “Save Lossless Copy of Project” feature because we were talking about creating .aup files that reference .wav files instead of .au files.
We already discussed the tag used by the new feature, and its ability to import WAV files. Its flaw was to that time that it could not handle envelopes. That can also be seen with these “lossless” copies of projects: The envelopes are mixed onto the WAV files and not saved for a later edit, which is not exactly lossless. (Is this a bug?)
batfinger: From your github page, I would assume you are asking about the effort of creating a Blender addon that exports and maybe imports Audacity project files. Therefore I try to briefly give an update on that and then also give considerations I already had so you can profit from that.
Btw. if you quickly need such a feature, you should check out http://blendervelvets.org/en/blue-velvet/ . It works with Ardour instead of Audacity.
The update:
Currently, my addon exports the currently selected audio strip to an Audacity file that it then opens. It also includes timeline markers. I did not release it yet, because at some point I wanted to wait for the Blender 2.8 to not release an addon for a depreciated software.
I also do not have as much time currently as I would like to have, so if you would like to fork my addon and improve it yourself, I can upload its current (only tested with 2.78 and ugly ^^) state to github.
Exporting multiple channels is in my opinion currently not useful for a Blender addon as explained in the following.
The considerations:
As far as I know, if you animated the audio volume in Blender, there is basically no way for an addon to export this animated volume to an Audacity envelope. This means for a developer of a multi-track audio exporter for Blender, that one is basically left with these options:
- One can render each audio track separately to apply the audio volume animation.
- One can ignore the fact that the audio volume might change and export everything with a constant volume (at least everything that has animated audio).
Exporting animated audio with a constant volume does not help, because especially for large projects one would have to fix the audio volumes of many tracks before one could start editing sound in Audacity. Rendering the audio tracks forces the user to stick to his initial audio volume considerations (as e.g. a volume that sometimes drops to 0 cannot later be changed). Therefore, a multi-track audio exporter for Blender currently does not make sense (as of my knowledge).
So I asked myself what the advantages of a multi-track audio exporter over a single-track audio exporter and importer are. And they come down to:
- Applying an effect to multiple layers at once
- Having an audio peak meter like Audacitys “Playback Meter”
The first point is inevitable, but does not occur too often. In most cases, one wants to apply a filter to one audio strip at a time. The second point can be avoided by implementing an audio peak meter for Blender.
So my conclusion was that it does not make any sense to create a multi-track audio exporter, that the addon just has to provide a seamless interface between Audacity and Blender for single audio strips, and that Blender needs an audio peak meter, which requires a rewrite of the Blender audio library “audaspace”.
This rewrite could be quite interesting for you, because you could apply for it as a project for the Google Summer of Code: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/GSoC/Ideas_Suggestions#Audio!