Data file split consolidation?

Audacity 3 Help Forum macOS
1

Hi -

I keep my Audacity projects on Dropbox so that I can work with them across multiple computers. Most of my projects are 2-hour DJ sets.

Dropbox is sensitive to the number of files being synced between destinations. Anything over 500k files starts to increase time required (apparently).

Audacity’s data set for Audacity projects splits a project into a set ~1MB files. For a 2-hour set, this creates hundreds of files per-project. I now have > 125 projects, which means I have 10’s of thousands of .au files created by Audacity.

Most of those projects are now primarily there for archival purposes. Since I don’t use them actively I’d be happy to have them less-efficient on opening - so the massively-split data files are not required.

I’ve not been able to find a way to “archive” or consolidate an Audacity project down to just a couple of files (and an ability to un-archive later).

Does such a thing exist?

If not, I’ll go put a request in the “new feature requests” forum.

2

It is a very bad idea to work on projects where the project is stored remotely. We see quite a few cases of people permanently losing their work when attempting to do that.

The simplest solution for saving an archive copy of a project, is to create a ZIP package containing the project file (.aup) and the “_data” folder so that the entire project is self contained in one file. To work on the file at a later date, download it to your local hard drive and extract the contents of the ZIP.

3

Creating a .zip is certainly possible, and what I’ll likely do. I was just curious if the Audacity team had thought of their own consolidation.

For the record, Dropbox isn’t really a “remote” store; it is a local store that is replicated / synched remotely. And it is world-class at doing so, and I wouldn’t ascribe any operational issues (e.g. apps not working) to any misbehavior on its part.

Thanks for the comment.
-jb