Specific needs with applying chains

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

Hi, New to Audacity but loving it so far, love what it does for my music.
I have a particular question about applying chains.
I have created a chain where I… 1) Normalize… 2) change the frequency of the MP3 from 440 to 432
and then 3) change the bitrate to 320 and then 4) save the new MP3 file.
This all works great but I can only do one directory at a time.
Here an small example of my directory structure…

C:\MP3s
\Country
\Jazz
\Blues
\Metal
\Judas Priest
\Megadeth
\Iron Maiden
\Piece of Mind
\Powerslave
1-title one.mp3
2-title tw0.mp3
etc
There are directories for Genre, Artists and Album… music kept nice and neat.
Problem is, I have to apply the specific chain to one directory at a time,
and is very very time consuming.
Audacity will not read a folder and ALL its subfolders in order for me to apply
the chain to ALL MP3 files in all folders and subfolder.
Is there a way around this? Am I missing something that Audacity can do
but just not aware of it? I would love to keep using this program for my current needs.
I does exactly what I need it to do and does it well and I don’t want to use another
program for it. Hoping a solution is available.

2

There’s no way round it in Audacity. A Chain can only be applied to the files in a single folder, not recursively.

Possible workarounds:

You may be able to use a third party “automation” app such as AutoHotKey to automate Audacity.

You may be able to write a script to perform the batch processing with SoX


I’ve added your “vote” for adding this feature to Audacity. That does not mean that it will be added any time soon (that’s entirely dependent on there being a developer to develop the feature), but just that the level of interest in particular new features is logged.

3

Thank you for your reply.
I will help this app out with a donation since i like using it so much.

Phil.