I like using Audacity as an audio editor for ableton. It’s really a great editor.
Unfortunately the one thing preventing it from being truly useable in this capacity is the “export” function.
To use Audacity as an offline editor for ableton requires the audio file to be saved directly.
As it is now, when editing a file offline the user must locate the file manually in order to “export” over the original file. This is impractical and cumbersome in session, when a simple “save” function will do it.
The problem is that Audacity does not work directly on audio files, it works on “projects”. When you import an audio file into Audacity, Audacity copies the audio data from the file into the Audacity project. Audacity can’t “save the file” because Audacity doesn’t have “the file”, it only has a copy of the audio data from the file.
What would be useful for you specific use case, would be if Audacity could automatically select the directory that you imported from as the export directory. You could then just do “File menu > Export”, and the file name and directory would be automatically set to overwrite the imported file. However, that would be significantly more dangerous for other users that may then overwrite irreplaceable recordings accidentally.
I agree that easier overwriting would be a “nice to have” feature for people that are using Audacity alongside other DAWs, but I think that would have to be a non-default option so as to not expose the majority of users to unnecessary risk of losing important work.
I’ve noted your support for this feature on the “Feature Requests” page of the Audacity wiki.
The problem is that the export directory defaults to the last used export directory, which may be different from the last used import directory.
Many DAWs will use WAV files in a “project” directory as their audio data. While DAWs can be very good for real-time effects, their abilities for “destructive” sample editing is frequently quite limited compared to Audacity, so it can be useful to use a separate “sample editor” (such as Audacity) along side the DAW, to directly edit the WAV files in the DAW’s project. For Audacity, this will usually mean a different import / export directory for each of the DAW’s projects.
I implore you to implement “export to source directory” (whatever you wanna call it) so we can finally use this great programme ALL the time with our DAW’s.
Looks like you got a hell of a lot of feature requests there, but i’m hoping this would rather easy to implement?
