Ok so I don’t know where are your priorities but the import/export system is a workflow blocker. The way it rely on “one track per file” is super wrong.
Why not simply export multiple files based on clips ? This is what 90% users need!
Working on a bunch of sounds into one track is far more easier just for the simple reason that screen are wider than tall, and the playerhead move horizontally…
And the tracks are super tall by default so 99% of the work is always hidden in the scroll doom.
here is my workflow for sfx : recording on a track, then split then iterate on a new track. then iterate again so I have many variants of my sounds. This worklow is broken at the moment I want to export.
But same issues for import. One should be able to import all in one simple track and have a good view on all the clips, modifying them, and re exporting them without the cumbersome tracks->align->merge->destroyyourwork.
Sounds like a feature request.
Go to GitHub - audacity/audacity: Audio Editor
Create a free account, click on “Issues”, click the green “New Issue” button, then beside “Enhancement Request” click the “Get Started” button.
How would the files be named? In your example the clips do not have unique names.
There is also export multiple by labels, but that doesn’t help with your workflow. However if you put all the clips on one track it is easy to create a label corresponding to each clip. Double-click in the clip, do CTRL-B, type a name and hit enter. Rinse and repeat. Now you can export multiple by labels and each file will have the unique name you assigned to it by the label.
Something I do a lot is import multiple short files. I want them all on one track. So I wrote a simple macro that cuts the audio from the second track and pastes it onto the end of the first track. You can’t iterate inside a macro, so after running the macro I delete the now empty track and run the macro again until all the clips are in the first track. I assigned a left-handed shortcut to the macro (so I can invoke the macro with my left hand and delete the track using the mouse in my right hand). Really fast, and doesn’t require tracks>align>merge.
I was thinking about this today and wondered if I could include deletion of the now-empty second track. Here’s the macro. There may be better ways to do this, but this works. Import all your clips then repeatedly invoke the macro until there’s only one track left. If you invoke it one more time the first track will be deleted (!), but Undo gets it back.
