Hello!,
I would like to know if there’s a way in audacity 2.x to limit the amount of formats in which the app can save files to just WAV. We are in the need of users saving their work in just that format and we couldn’t find any direct way to narrow down options in Audacity.
Thanks so much in advance!
Sebas.
I don’t know of any way to do that. Once you step outside of the regular Audacity tools and settings you’re into reprogramming and coding.
Maybe in some distant future version, but only if a bunch of people ask for it.
If you go through an Audacity program settings reset, then WAV export will consistently pop up first in the export options. That’s the long way around, but that does work. It also messes up favorite editing settings and it’s not guaranteed.
Koz
Ed (user Edgar) has written a customised version of Audacity that has some specific export options such as Export PCM but it doesn’t mean you can export without making a decision as to file names. Even the PCM export still has options to export as OGG, MP3 and other formats so maybe I am not looking at the appropriate modification.
If you just want fewer menu items you can try reducing them using the Audacity translation mechanism: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/simplifying_audacity.html .
I’ve asked Ed to look in here. He usually does a few hours of programming for free and charges for his time beyond that. Perhaps you could give a clearer specification of how automatic you want the export to be.
Gale
Hi Sebas!
Limiting export formats is one of, if not, the highest priority requests I get. In fact, I have my personal version hardcoded to always save as 32-bit WAV or 16-bit WAV (I must recompile to change back and forth but am typically using one or the other extensively so this is not too big problem for me).
Another common request is to force it to always default to a specific format that still allow the user to choose any of the others. This involves overriding a configuration setting and is fairly easy.
I will need a lot more details to determine how best I may help you on this. Do you have a programming team in place? If so, have they successfully compiled wxWidgets & Audacity? Do you have a design team who has, or is ready to, design(ed) the user interface incumbent in this change? Since this does not appear to be for personal use, are you familiar with the (minimal and reasonable) restrictions Audacity asks of those who change the code?
Hello again!,
First of all, thanks so much for the quick replies!.
@kozikowsky and Gale: Thanks so much for your suggestions, there are great and most useful!.
@Edgar: basically, what we have is an automated process that will allow end users to edit sound files for them to remove specific portions of it. Once they finish editing the file, we compair sizes between the original and the edited copy to check for changes, as we don’t want users creating duplicates of the original files; if the edited copy is smaller than the original one, then we process it, if it isn’t, then we don’t. For this, we have a script in place that checks both sizes and file formats.
So, if users select a different file format for exporting their edited data, we would still be on a good spot because that file will not get processed… however, end users are often not the brightest kids out there and if they indeed save the file in, let’s say mp3, we will secure our information, but the process will fail and they will start complaining about it, regardless of who’s fault is it.
Because of the above, we were thinking of restricting Audacity to just save files as the only format we would accept for processing, thus eliminating any creative moments end user might have.
We do have development teams but they are not involved in this effort, as we deal in engineering. Users would just cut out chunks of audio, so no advanced functionality is needed: just for them to open the file, delete whatever needs to go and save it.
I’m a PHP/Actionscript coder, so, that wouldn’t help either =P
We can actually make this happen with Audacity’s default functionality with no problems, but the idea behind my enquiry was to see if there were ways to tweak-up the app in a restrictive way to eliminate any room for human error.
Again, thanks so much for the help and, if further details are needed, please let me know.
I can’t thank enough! =)
Sebas
How about Saving Audacity Projects? Do you want to ban the user from doing that?
As far as Exporting, what do you want to do about filename conflicts? If the user Imports ABC.MP4 do you want to force the filename to be ABC.wav? How about if the user Imports XYZ.wav, do you wish to retain the original (XYZ.wav.bac)?
It sounds like it would make some sense to write the file length test into Audacity and make it the traffic cop. The Export menu item would be grayed out (unavailable for selection) until the user had deleted some audio. Immediately prior to the Export process an additional test would be made to ensure that the user hasn’t “tricked” Audacity (this would ensure that the existing audio was shorter than the original audio).
Just ironing out a clear and specific design goal for a project of this nature will take a couple hours of my time. Generally I charge for this kind of design work – somewhere in the neighborhood of $200-$400 US for something like this. Thereafter, I would give you a firm bid for the programming with half due upfront and the balance upon completion. Without having a written design goal I can’t give you a firm bid on the programming but I would guess that you are looking at someplace between $1000 and $2000 US, assuming that I am not writing any documentation and that you will do most of the beta testing. BTW, I only develop on Windows 7 so any compiling and testing on Linux or Mac will be your responsibility.
Typically, instead of having you pay me for the design work I would have you make a donation directly to Audacity mentioning my name and your company’s name with the donation. This is a way for both of us to honor and support all the hard work that the Audacity Developers do. Immediately after Gale informs me of your donation I would present you with a firm bid (and probably some alpha software with an annoying splash screen) and we would go from there.