Review of project file handling? (.au file sizes)

Hello,

Apologies if there is already a thread on this but I can’t seem to find much after a quick search. Very appreciative of the recent updates to Audacity with VSTs and editing features that are making it a much more capable audio editing programme. But I wonder if there are plans to review how project files are handled? Currently Audacity has those .au files which from what I can tell are individual chunks of audio that rack up lots of storage space. I have been clearing some hard drives recently and have noticed that these ‘_data’ folders and their .au files take up a lot of space given they’re associated with projects that are editing one source audio file (if that makes sense?). Are there plans to handle files like other programmes where edits are stored as references to source media rather than lots of .au files? I presume this way of handling files would also open up the possibility to have non destructive editing then? Hope all this makes sense and thanks for reading.

Where have you been? The .au files and _data directory went bye-bye with the unitary .aup3 file structure introduced in 3.3.0 a couple of years ago.

And the developers have been releasing updates with real-time (non-destructive) editing for the past maybe six months or so.

The current release of Audacity is 3.3.2 which includes all of these things: Download | Audacity ®

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Where have you been?

My goodness… Living under a rock evidently! :laughing:

These are old project files from several years back. What’s the process for upgrading them to the new format? Can I just save them as and then safely discard the ‘_data’ folders? Thanks!

Yes, just open up those old projects in a 3.x version of Audacity and Save the project. This will make an AUP3 project in the consolidated SQLite database format - and yes you can the delete the folder(s) full of all those little AU files and the AUP project files.

Peter

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Excellent, thank you! Thanks again to the devs for the recent huge leaps of progress with the software and sorry for my ignorance!

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