James Crook’s take on this back in 2019, when he was considering taking on this mini-project give s some interesting insight into how this might be approached. It’s on the Talk page of the original Wiki proposal that I wrote:
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There he wrote:
James 22Mar19:
I looked at working on this proposal at the start of 2.3.2. I found that it would be complex to implement if we had very specific choices of what was allowed ‘during timer record’ and what was not. Example: During waiting for a recording should we be allowed to change audio device, for example? Probably yes, but that takes time for some devices - and recording could attempt to start during a device change. Hard to implement that right.
I’ve decided the proposal needs more work, if it is me coding it. I’ve some suggestions:
Timer Record is a data entry screen. It can be opened at any time. It is modeless!
There is a button ‘Arm’ on it.
When Arm is down timer record is active and the normal Audacity GUI is locked out.
When Arm up, the normal Audacity GUI is active, and timer record will not start or stop recording.
In this way, you can arm/disarm timer record at any time, to get on with all your normal activity. Nothing is disabled when you have timer record disabled. You could, for example, after timer record has started recording, disarm timer record (recording continues), adjust levels, adjust the end time, and re-arm timer record, leaving it to finish off the recording at its new end time.
The current prohibition on timer record when there are unsaved changes would change.
A check box, checked by default, would enable close to current behaviour.
You could not arm a recording-start if there were unsaved changes. The dialog would show that ‘Unsaved Changes’ and ‘Arm’ button greyed out…
If in timer recording, a disarm would prompt with an ‘Are you sure?’ dialog.
Unchecking the check box, and you could proceed without those warnings / checks.
The current progress dialog would be integrated in the TimerRecord dialog, rather than be separate. As we can now return from the progress dialog to the timer record set up dialog, making them one is visually better.
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I suspect that James did not think that it was :
" as easy as just telling the timer window to not be a modal"
as otherwise he would likely have done just that - but like LWinterberg I am not (well not for a very long time anyway) a programmer - I only look at Audacity from the outside, from a user and UX perspective.
Peter.