Several releases/years ago, the Save and Archive menu actions were consolidated into a submenu.
Selecting these in the menus now requires extra mouse movement or keyboard strokes to navigate to. Of the potentially thousands of software products I’ve used on Macs and PCs in the past three decades, I’ve never encountered another product where Save was buried like this. It might please some to have a tidy File menu with fewer top-level options. Import and Export, for example, totally make sense to push down, and that’s consistent with common menu patterns. But Save in a submenu is not common…for a reason. Please, please consider pulling Save and Archive back up to the top File menu. Respectfully…
You don’t need extra keyboard strokes to save the project. Just use “Cmd + S”.
But Audacity isn’t like most other software in that it operates on “projects”. In most software, the “saved” thing is the end product, but for Audacity the “saved” thing is Audacity’s project environment, whereas the “end product” is an audio file that is exported from the project. In the past we have seen very many people asking for help because they can’t play their “saved file” in iTunes / WMP / favourite media player. Since “Save” and “Export” have been separated into their own sub-menus, this problem hardly comes up any more.
Yes, a lot of people requested shorter menus, and the developers listened, but as you say, it doesn’t suit everyone.
For my money, I’d remove Save Project As and place Save Project and Backup Project into the top-level file menu.
Back in Audacity 2.2.2 and earlier we had the Saves in the top level menu:
It was in 2.3.0 and later that we introduced the sub-menu:
The reasons I think that Backup Project is an excellent replacement for Save Project as are:
a) it keeps your current project open and doesn’t switch you to a “save as” project,
b) clarity of purpose - it encourages the user to think about backups.
But I suspect that Muse would not be keen to entertain this …
Peter
Given that “Page Setup” and “Print” are in this menu for no good reason at this point, I’d say we can move the three save options into the main menu. Maybe something like this:
File
New
Open
Recent
PopulateRecentFilesStep
Import
ImportAudio
ImportLabels
ImportMIDI
ImportRaw
====================
Save
SaveAs
SaveCopy
Export
ExportMp3
ExportWav
ExportOgg
Export
ExportSel
ExportLabels
ExportMultiple
ExportMIDI
====================
Close
Exit
The idea being a division in add, save, close. The Print items would wander into the extras menu for now.
I would generally support this Leo - but I really would not like to see “SaveCopy” Replace “Backup Project” - as the current nomenclature is intended to make users think about making backups.
SaveCopy seem to me to be a lot less strong in that regard.
Peter.
the names in this list are just the internal function names I got out of the debug menu (in alpha builds)