Audacity 1.2.6 and Exporting as FLAC

[waxcylinder]

Ed, I think the developers are trying to be helpful by offering you more options here

However if Audacity can be fixed so that it remembers your preferred setting then that should make it easier for you to use.

WC

[steve]

The other Audacity silence generator was a breeze:highlight a section,clear the current time and type in .08...done.

Do you want to replace the current selection with 0.8 seconds of silence
or insert 0.8 seconds of silence?

To insert silence - don't make a selection, just click on the track where you want to insert the silence.
To replace a selection with silence, (probably the easiest but not only way) is to make the selection then press the delete key (deletes the selection) then proceed as for "inserting" silence.

Then select "Generate > Silence"
Click on the arrow next to the number box and select "hh:mm:ss + hundredths"
By default the amount of silence to insert will be 30 seconds and the "3" will be highlighted.
without clicking anywhere type in the number 008
This will replace "00h 00m 30.00s" with "00h 00m 00.80s"
Click "OK"

If you are going to want to insert 0.8 seconds in several places you can now copy the silence that you have generated (Ctrl+C) and simply paste it wherever you want it using Ctrl+V.

[Gale Andrews]

To try and clarify. In 1.3, only the DTMF and Noise Generators remember their duration from one Audacity session to another when generating at a point. The others will default to 30 seconds. If you drag a region, remembering a length is irrelevant.

None of the generators remember the selection format. The design decision was made that when generating at a point (inserting, so increasing the length of the track), the time format is in whole seconds irrespective of your time selection format in Selection Toolbar. If selecting a region and generating into that (so keeping the track length the same), the selection format is always hh:mm:ss + samples. The rationale was that you can almost never drag out a region that is a complete second (unless you enable "Snap to" in Selection Toolbar), so show the length you have actually dragged out down to the finest granularity, which is samples.

1.3 has "TimeTextControls" for time selection in generators - those spinning boxes for each character. This makes it much easier for visually impaired users to manipulate these time values. There is a slight penalty for sighted users that you cannot now simply overtype an arbitrary value unless it's the selected (white) time value.

In 1.2.6, if you wanted to work in samples selection format or something other than seconds (View > Set Selection Format), then having the generators in seconds was a pain. Unfortunately, 1.3 still has the problem that the generators do not default to the selection format you chose in Selection Toolbar. A number of users have suggested they should. I think on balance that when generating at a point, generators should default to the current Selection Format. When generating at a region, they should default as now to hh:mm:ss + samples. However if the user wants to change each generator to some other format, that format should be remembered. So in your case you might want to default them to hh:mm:ss + hundredths. None of this is a bug though - it's "design decisions".

So Ed, pending such a change, there isn't any easy one step way to generate ".8" seconds. I assume you want to overwrite a region with silence as you are seeing "samples" in the Generate Silence dialogue. You may find it easier to select the region you want to generate into in Selection Toolbar. Right-click over Selection Toolbar and choose "hh:mm:ss + hundredths". You only have to make this change once in Selection Toolbar, as opposed to having to make it every time in the Generate dialogues. Set the End/Length button in Selection Toolbar to "Length". Click the last digit but one from right and type "8". Then just Generate > Silence and hit OK, disregarding what it says about "samples".

Had you wanted to generate whole seconds, you could check "Snap to" in Selection Toolbar. Then whatever region you dragged, it would always start at a whole second and its length would be a whole second. You could again ignore the hh:mm:ss + samples display in the generator.


Gale

[Gale Andrews]

In spite of what the Release Notes say for 1.2.6, FLAC support I believe only works for import in Windows and Mac. FLAC export is broken and won't be fixed because we are no longer developing 1.2. FLAC import and export should work on Linux if you compile with a modern libflac but I think few people are compiling 1.2 on Linux now. I'll make it clearer on the web page.


Gale