Audacity Forum

Hello, dear all

I am working with e-learning projects, where each lesson contains about a hundred audio tracks (for slides, objects and such). Audacity is unbeatable in removing all the noise from recordings with amateur equipment, truly a great product. What concerns me from the usability point of view, is the inability to save the edited tracked over the original .wav file, thus overwriting it. I end up with a voluminous filing system (slide1.wav, slide1a.wav, slide1b.wav, etc). Instead, I would like to save very much in a fashion most users are accustomed to: opening, editing and saving using a single file (wav).

Naturally, this is more of a suggestion to developers, than an actual problem. Nevertheless, maybe someone can offer an optimization to this kind of workflow? I am sure there are other users with WAV editing needs

I am terribly sorry if this issue has been discussed ad infinitum - haven't found anything in this regard.

Sincerely yours,
MK

P.S. Happy New Year, too!

I had a similar issue several months ago and posted questions to this forum. While some of the responses bordered on ridicule, I did get a response from alatham that explained why this occurs.

"When you try to overwrite that original WAV file, Audacity's currently open project is fully dependent on it. This is because Audacity doesn't store sound data in RAM (that would quickly eat through tons of RAM), so it needs to constantly read from that file while you're working on the project. When you import that file, Audacity bars any programs (even itself) from altering it. As such, it will complain."

In other words, Audacity will not overwrite WAVs.

I see, thank you. Meanwhile, I discovered I can batch my cleaning jobs by importing multiple tracks into a project, and removing noise from all tracks at once. Then the original .wavs can be then overwritten using multiple export option. A potential problem there is that noise patterns differ, however slightly, from track to track.

Perhaps using a swap file would be a more user-friendly solution, considering the limitations quoted by the previous author. I suppose no major code rewriting would be necessary, disk space is not an issue nowadays and it is definitely, definitely more compatible with the workflow most of us are accustomed to. Just a minor suggestion.

Oh, we've had some go-arounds with this resulting in code change in some of the Audacity versions.

Audacity doesn't Save audio files. It saves Projects which are clouds of closely associated production files--fast and efficient, but easily damaged and surprisingly surprising if that's not what you're expecting. The only way to get one good, stable, stand-alone, email-able sound file is to Export as Something.... WAV is good because all three computing platforms know what it is and it doesn't have compression damage.

If your goal is to get small files for your Zune, then MP3 or one of the other compressed formats is for you. You shouldn't produce your show while in MP3 because it's slow and the compression damage accumulates as you go. Save compression for the last step.

Koz