Exciting New Cloud Services

It’s possible from the file menu (?) to save a current Project to audio.com cloud services.

A forum poster seems to have saved-ordinary their project to the local drive first, and then to audio.com. Saving their show to audio.com seems to have deleted the show on the local drive in favor of the cloud version.

And then the cloud version failed. The question is not what happened to the cloud version, but am I correct that the process removed the local version?

I’m also assuming that the poster used Plain Save and did not use “Save Backup Project.”

Koz

Hi Koz,

from my testing what actually seems to happen if you save first to local disk and then the to the cloud - then the cloud version appears to dominate.

My local AUP3 was not deleted but when I tried to open the local copy it actually switched to the cloud copy.

Any changes I made to the cloud copy then seem to be replicated (synced) to the local AUP3 project. In fact you can see the two (on Windows) temporary local project files being created while the cloud project is open - and they get removed when the cloud project is closed.

When I deleted the cloud project, and then tried to open the local AUP3 Audacity complained that it couldn’t sync


And when I dismiss that dialog with the OK button I end up with an empty project.


I do not know whether this is by accident or design - but it would seem to be more than somewhat incautious (to say the least) to save the same project locally AND in the cloudy stuff.

Peter.

We can guess what one of the Golden Goals was. Be able to say Audacity can store stuff in the cloud. And do it without someone trying to execute a critically timed overdubbing session with a drive in a warehouse outside of Manchester.

Somebody good with Promotion and Publicity wrote that.

Everything works OK if you skip the Save Local step? Only save your Project on audio.com?

Koz

Can you drop into this thread?

I’m not sure where to go from here.

Koz

Hi Koz,

well basically that is what I would do (if I was ever to to tempted to store in the cloud aka “somebody else’s computer”).

I can see that it is (let me be kind here) admirable that:
IF you store a project in on a local drive and then store the same project in the cloud as a duplicate
THEN the two copies of the same project are kept in step.

But the law of unintended consequences seems to be holding sway here - there are use cases that have not been considered - like my example earlier of deleting the cloud project - which then effectively “deletes” the local disk copy, but actually leaves a project of that name on the disk - leading the unwary user to assume that they still have a local copy of the project when they really don’t.


I can try, but I’m no magician (more of a Mickey Mouse Sorcerer’s Apprentice). I suspect that this user’s damaged project may well be beyond rescuing.

I think I will be raising this as an issue or discussion on Muse’s GitHub issues log.

For my money a couple of things should obtain:

a) If the user has a local project and then stores that project in the cloud, then Audacity should warn the user that the two projects will be sync-locked in step (effectively a single project with a shadow copy).

b) If the user has such a double-location project then when the user deletes the project from the cloud Audacity should warn the user that they also have a local copy and ask if they want to keep or delete it. And if they keep it then it should be retained in the state of the project immediately prior to the cloud deletion.


Incidentally I have not tested the obverse use case of saving a project in the cloud and then saving the project as a local disk copy - that might be “interesting” too …

And another use case to test: with such a duplicate project try deleting only the local disk copy. Note that information about the cloud syncing is held in a new folder called Cloud in the Audacity settings folder - so it might be fun to try deleting that folder too and exploring the consequences.

Peter.

I have logged this as:

Peter.

A possible workaround: Synching behavior of joint cloud and local projects can cause users to silently lose the local project when the audio.com version is deleted · Issue #6807 · audacity/audacity · GitHub

If you have a cloud connected project and you use the Save As dialogue to make a new project file on a local drive, is that new copy also cloud connected?

And also Save Backup. Do all those end up linked?

Those are the other two “Saves” I was referring to in my post.

Koz

Given the goal of Sharing is to, y’know, share, how do you tell Sharing to allow me to look at your Projects?

All of them?

I see the problems people have keeping relatively simple local shows working, I wonder about the experiences of people sharing Projects.

“I am preparing voice work for two different clients…”

Koz

I don’t think so - but you could easily test that

Peter.

Similalry I don’t think those get synced - but that can be tested for

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From watching Tantacrul’s video again on YouTube for the 3.5 release:

it appears that Muse principally envisage three use cases for cloud-based projects:

a) the ability for you work on projects an a variety of different machines in various locations without having to carry the project around on, say, a USB stick.

b) the ability to revert to earlier versions of the project (which you can’t do with a locally stored project unless you manually created staged backups

c) sharing projects with others, letting them review your work and even sharing the editing of projects (I hope lockouts for multiple user write access has been properly tested).

Oh and of course monetization, as you only get a maximum of five stored projects and 2GB at any one time for free - but that could/should be enough for most/many users.

There is no mention there of cloud/local syncing or of using cloud storage as your offsite backup.

Peter.

OK so I did some simple testing with a simple cloud-based project (no syncing with a local project).

When I use Save As or Backup project I get offered CloudProjects as the default location in the save dialog.

  1. If I switch the location to my local drive (I used desktop) the the Save As and the Backup Project worked fine to the local drive. They were NOT synced to a cloud copy of the project. I deleted the cloud based project and the local backup and Save As AUP3 projects opened fine.

  2. However if I accept CloudProjects as the location then they appear to work as there are no errors BUT no additional projects are created in the Cloud. - and the Save As does not get the project name changed (so that’s a clue that it didn’t work).

I have to do some further testing with synced local/cloud shadowed projects - but certainly 2 above looks like a bug to me - but I shan’t report it till I get time to do the further sync testing.

Peter

I haven’t done the further testing yet (I ran out of time today, sorry) - but I logged this issue on Muse’s GitHub issues log

This one is IMHO pretty serious as it fails silently and appears to the user from all the immediate cues to have worked properly - it is only later (possibly much later) that most users discover they don’t have their backups (or saved as projects) in the cloud - and by then it may be far too late (when they actually need their backup version of the project).

Still to be tested are

  1. using these commands to create cloud projects from a local project
  2. using these commands to create cloud projects from a synced local/cloud project

Peter

Also still to be tested is “the dog chewed my Internet cable while I was working on a cloud-based project” - or on a synced local/cloud project too.

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