It would be convenient to be able to store information about a project (e.g. effect settings, sound sources, etc) that is unwanted or even inappropriate to include as metadata to an exported file, but without having to create (say) a separate text or word document file to store it (especially now that Audacity saves each project as a single file). Labels are also not really appropriate for this use case, either.
I’ve looked through the menus and searched in the forum (well, briefly - if you search for “notes”, you get a lot of hits on music notes, which is perfectly understandable, but not what I’m looking for. ) and haven’t found functionality like this. Does it exist?
As it was presented in the issue (recording notes for recording podcasts), I’d rather solve this by having a minified “widget” version of Audacity which still shows you what you need to know and gives you a quick way to start/stop the recording. That way you can focus on your text document/browser/… on which you actually have the stuff you need for the episode.
information about a project (e.g. effect settings, sound sources, etc)
I’d rather we not lose this info in the first place. For effect settings this is possible as of 3.2 if you use realtime effects, so you even can change your effect settings after you have saved your project and loaded it back up months later. For sound sources, the clip title has some info, but I don’t think it’s sufficient. Having a full copy of the metadata for each clip accessible would be better, especially for productions where you need to report how much of what song you used for licensing purposes later on.
Unfortunately, as much as I’d like to, all of these specialized use cases need to come later. We first need to get functionality more close to what things should be.
I guess it is fairly specialized if not many people have asked for it, in which case ‘need to come later’ is only to be expected.
That said, I still feel that a free-form text window (no word-processor-type formatting or anything, though a certain amount of text editing functionality — i.e. more like Notepad++ than Notepad, to cite a Windows-specific example — would be helpful) could be useful for more cases than I admit are occurring to me at the moment.
The two examples I gave were just a couple I thought of in the moment. I’ve often found myself making pencil (or sometimes text-document) notes about aspects of an Audacity project I’m working on.
In addition to my original examples: sometimes I want to note a specific timestamp (to note the beginning of a spoken passage or musical phrase), or the length of a selected piece of audio (sometimes even down to a specific number of samples!).
I’m not expecting that this would be added immediately or even that it happen any time soon. But I also hope that the idea doesn’t just get dismissed outright, either. If it is, then it can’t come later.
So I’ll see if I am competent enough to add a feature request per @waxcylinder’s suggestion.
curiousmind
I totally agree with your initiating post.
I might have posted on this a while ago.
Maintaining copious notes is part of disciplined organization, thinking and record keeping.
I truly miss this in Audacity.
(For example, I use Cakewalk Notes feature, extensively and will be lost without it)
) and haven’t found functionality like this. Does it exist?