Feature request: Next gen non-destructive audio editing with Audacity

Feedback and Discussion Forum Adding Features
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It is often (or probably always) during editing that one needs the original clip to stay untouched to be able to easily change an earlier edit-step (say, the 5th one from 100) in the process.

With destructive editing, going back to step #5 and reworking everything again to step #100 would really be a quite a negative experience – effort, time, …

Obviously, with a non-destructive type of editing all would be different – one would just need to adjust step #5 without the need to go again working through the following 95 ones.

I’d assume it would be quite a challenge to turn Audacity into a non-destructive editor, but I thought it still might make sense to bring up the topic to explore the potential value and also accompanying technical challenges.

So do you see any possibility of making Audacity a non-destructive editor in the long run?
Or even offering the best of both worlds making it possible to e.g., render / bounce non-destructive tracks (or parts of them) and then mute them (or the parts) to ease the CPU, and later having the possibility to again unmute them to make respective changes as needed.

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I think the term you are looking for is Nodes.

Nodes are a group of settings that can be disabled, chained to other nodes, enabled again, rearranged, locked to a place the timeline, etcetera. It is something that I have been asking for in Audacity.

If you want to experiment with the concept, there is an audio editor named Fairlight that is part of a larger video editor called Davinci Resolve. Fair warning though, the program is complicated, and has a steep learning curve.

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