Hi everyone! I’m new to Audacity 4.0 and have a quick question: Is there a way to simply drag & drop edited audio material from Audacity into another program, for example?
Like, from Audacity to where? On what platform (macOS, Windows, Linux)? Have you tried? What about copy and paste?
On Windows, copying from Audacity to paste in other audio software is not possible.
Need to export from Audcaity, e.g. as WAV, then you may be able to drag that WAV into other software.
I’m using Audacity and VLC media player on macOS.
I specifically use VLC for auditioning audio, samples, and sound effects that I then want to edit in Audacity. It would be incredibly useful to be able to drag directly from the playlist view in VLC to Audacity when I’ve found a sound I like rather than having to locate the file on disk using Finder and then from there into Audacity.
The current method is awkward because:
- Audio titles don’t always match the name of the file on disk
- Although VLC does display the file URI, it gets awkward for long paths
- VLC does also offer a “Reveal in Finder” option, which works OK, but feels like an unnecessary extra step: in particular the experience isn’t great here when working only on my laptop’s screen and having VLC in one half and Audacity in the other because it pops up another Finder window which partially obscures one or both of the VLC and Audacity windows
This wouldn’t be dragging audio across from VLC so much as dragging across the metadata, including the full path of the audio file: Audacity could then use this to open the file itself.
The UX of the auditioning experience would be massively improved by supporting this.
Many thanks,
Bart
Given that much of the existing functionality from Audacity 3 is omitted from v4, I wouldn’t hold out much hope of getting the feature you are asking for.
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If you don’t ask you don’t get. I know they have plenty of other priorities but it’s always worth suggesting quality of life improvements like this because they’re often relatively small pieces of work that can make a big difference to some use cases.
(Although, possibly, reading this thread a bit more carefully now I have a bit more time this might be better as a separate request.)
Very true.
What you need is a way to quickly audition files before they go into a project. This is a standard DAW feature, hence why Audition, Ableton, Blender et al. do have a custom file browser/sound library/asset manager-type feature. I do think this is a valid feature request, adjacent to project bins and other DAW stuff. For once I can say that while I have added a project bin to Soundscaper , I have not added such a feature as the web-based version cannot access your file system (though I think I could make a browser for freesound.org) .
Anyway: Drag’n’drop from Audacity to other apps is technically hard. Audacity doesn’t actually store every bit of waveform you see, if you duplicate clips, it’ll only store them once. The copy/paste system isn’t based on actual audio data, but project metadata instead. It would be possible to render the copied data into a WAV file every time to facilitate pasting into programs that accept file drag’n’drop, but it does mean waiting for an export to happen every time you copy/paste inside Audacity. So I don’t think it’ll ever become a feature.