question /suggestion re: how audacity records

I had a conversation earlier today with a friend in audio engineering about Audacity and how it works compared to other popular DAWs.

He said …

The reliability issues I have with it have more to do with how the app actually functions. It doesn’t generate WAV files and bundle them with the mix files. Everything is in one single file. If anything goes wrong, you lose EVERYTHING.

If my mix session file gets corrupted in Logic or Adobe Audition, I still have the source WAV files so I can start over and just create a new mix.

I absolutely HATE how much audio and time has been lost because of Audacity’s app architecture and functionality. It is baaaaad.

I’m curious with all the work being done on Audacity if this is something that’s being looked at? If not, maybe something to add to the list?

Thanks!

David

For a couple of years I was using Audacity in a work environment literally every working day, and never lost a single project. Even if I had lost a project, I had backups of both the source files and routine project backups. Making project backups is even easier these days now that Audacity has a dedicated “Backup Project” command.

Aup3 is generally as resilient as the sqlite database inside it. Typically it’s very resilient as sqlite is also used for things like Firefox bookmarks, so if it wasn’t any good, there’d be gigantic fallout everywhere. Fwiw, you even can recover the database if it fails.

That said: There are other reasons why “put everything in a single file” is problematic - it for example breaks collaborative workflows where one person provides WAVs on a server and another person mixes them together in a project. Being able to dynamically update files as they’re being added to the server is super important for this, and aup / Audacity 2.x could do it with some limitations, but aup3/ Audacity 3.x just can’t. So we’ll definitely need to look into enabling this again. But all of that is firmly in “far future” territory.

Thanks for the info!

Steve, I’m with you that my personal experience as far as stability of everything has been good. I’m looking forward to jumping in with the upcoming version and am looking forward to what you guys have planned!