Exporting annoyances

[jks]

I'm using 1.3.7 on Fedora 9.

I originally ripped an ogg vorbis file from a CD, but found one track had an annoying 1 minute intro. So I reripped it to a FLAC file, edited out the intro, and tried to export as an ogg vorbis file. When I did I got a popup asking me to edit the metadata info. Why wasn't this preserved?

My second annoyance was that after I opened a second window when I went back to the first the export options were all grayed out. I had to open the file again in order to do the export. I haven't been able to reproduce this.

[steve]

When I did I got a popup asking me to edit the metadata info. Why wasn't this preserved?

I don't use metadata myself (so I am certainly not an expert in this), but some things to consider:

Audacity supports multiple tracks, and you can import multiple files into the same project, but once the files are imported, the data is all in the same "pool". This means that you can freely copy and paste form one track into another, juggle tracks around in their order and along the time line, and mangle them together in pretty much any way that you want, but it also means that Audacity is unable to keep track of what metadata belongs with which track. Audacity therefore holds just one set of metadata tags for the Project (these are written into the AUP file).

If you import one track into a new project, then metadata should be preserved, however, ID3v2 is something of a non-standard "standard" and there are many different versions of it. Audacity attempts to support the most common and most standard parts, but there are significant differences between the metadata in FLAC files from Ogg or MP3 and some parts are not directly transferable.

The metadata editor is set to pop-up by default on Export (this option can be switched off in Preferences). You can also see what metadata is held in a project at any time by opening the Metadata Editor from the File menu.

Regarding the second issue, you need to be careful opening more than one instance at a time. The correct way to do this is from the file menu (New) or Ctrl+N. You should not launch a second instance of Audacity from your Applications menu, from the command line, or from a shortcut as this can lead to data getting mixed up between the projects. In the worst case this can lead to corruption of the audacity.cfg file.

In recent versions of Audacity there have been attempts to prevent such problems, but problems still do happen from time to time. Personally I prefer to only have one project open at a time, which completely avoids these possible issues. I don't find this to be a restriction in my work-flow as if I want to access part of a different file, I simply Import it into the project and mute or delete it when it is no longer needed.

So this is more of a personal view than an "answer", but hopefully something useful in it.

[jks]

When I did I got a popup asking me to edit the metadata info. Why wasn't this preserved?

I don't use metadata myself (so I am certainly not an expert in this), but some things to consider:

The metadata editor is set to pop-up by default on Export (this option can be switched off in Preferences). You can also see what metadata is held in a project at any time by opening the Metadata Editor from the File menu.

Yes the original metadata is still there, but when I try to export a popup appears with blank metadata that I have to fill in.

Regarding the second issue, you need to be careful opening more than one instance at a time. The correct way to do this is from the file menu (New) or Ctrl+N.

That is what I did.

[steve]

Just done a bit of testing - it looks like Audacity can Import and Export metatag data for MP3 and Ogg files, but for Flac files it can only export metatag data and not import it.

Let's see if this is just a Linux issue: http://audacityteam.org/forum/viewtopic ... 15&t=10703

after I opened a second window when I went back to the first the export options were all grayed out. I had to open the file again in order to do the export. I haven't been able to reproduce this.

Lets hope it was a one off.

[jks]

Just done a bit of testing - it looks like Audacity can Import and Export metatag data for MP3 and Ogg files, but for Flac files it can only export metatag data and not import it.

Let's see if this is just a Linux issue: http://audacityteam.org/forum/viewtopic ... 15&t=10703

To be clear when I opened the FLAC file (originally created by sound-juicer) audacity did have the metadata, it just didn't use it when exporting the ogg file.