Copying and pasting time info text

Audacity 3 Help Forum
1

… to and from those very awful, misGUIded time input widgets at the bottom.
Warning! Some sour ranting from a very frustrated user might follow.

Maan, what were the original designers thinking, by forcing this extremely cumbersome input method?!!! “Nah, you should only be able to enter or select one digit per position”. This monstrosity of a GUI failure has existed since version 1.x, would you believe?!!! Why can’t I just select all the time info and then copy the textual time info to the clipboard, or paste from the clipboard into the widget.

Example: Format is set to ‘hh:mm:ss + milliseconds’ (so the designers had knowledge of part of the defacto standard way to describe a time duration in ‘hh:mm:ss.SSS’ but choose not to use it in the implementations of the actual input widgets)
Current position is, say, ‘00:27:17.502’, sorry, I mean ‘00h27m17.502s’
I want to jump to position ‘02:03:03.877’ (or described in that “very special” audacity format ‘02h03m03.877s’ that you even can’t select and copy or paste to as a whole.).
So to change position from ‘00h27m17.502s’ to ‘02h03m03.877s’ I have to visit every digit in the widget and enter either by arrow up or down (oh, that probably must be what those original designers was so excited and felt justified about) or type the digit it self. I can’t just paste a time duration into this “genius” widget. hmm?
But wait, the program I’m getting those values from (mpc-hc) can also give the duration in frames ‘221296, 29.970’ that must be the “NTSC Frames” input format. Surely I can just paste ‘221296’ into that? NOPE!

Sorry for my ranting,- there are so many great and wonderful things about Audacity, but maan, I really hate this part.

2

A bit of background from an old-timer that may take the edge off your ire:

When Dominic and Roger began the Audacity project, there were few choices for cross-platform open source GUI libraries. Qt existed, but the license terms were not very open-source friendly, and they wanted the application to be free and open source for everyone. The other option was WxWidgets, which was fully open source and supported Window, Mac and Linux.

The “time widget” is part of the WxWidgets library.

Had WxWidgets not been available, Audacity may have turned out to be Linux only, or cost money.

Looking to the future:

The license terms of Qt have changed, making it a viable (and very good) option for developing Desktop applications. The developers have been working for the last couple of years towards porting Audacity from Wx to Qt. This opens up the possibility of a much slicker and modern looking GUI.

Moral of the story:

Do the best you can with what you have.

1 Like
3

Yeah, sorry.
My ranting should have been directed upstream to WxWidgets “time widget” designers, and I understand the cross platform and yesteryears Qt licensing problems. (And think that WxWidgets in looks and feel, and especially code readability/understandability (I started my gui programming experiences last millennium with Turbo Vision, Delphi and C++ builder), are way better than that other OS cross platform gui lib available at the time, GTK :grimacing:. So wise choice with WxWidgets)
And I’m happy to hear there are plans to migrate to Qt which is a so much more modern Gui lib and with afaik some heavy-weight backers, or atleast users, behind.

Thanks, @steve for dulling my ire :grin: :+1: