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Ideas for a Class Project
Posted: Tue Nov 06, 2012 3:01 am
by audioholic7
I am a Junior CS major enrolled in a data structures course. For a final project I have to select a piece of open source software to modify. I want to work with Audacity, but need some help getting started. Ultimately, the goal of the project is to modify an existing data structure to marginally improve performance. I was hoping to field suggestions on what data structure I should focus my efforts. I have compiled Audacity on Linux and have browsed through the source code. I find this task a little daunting because I have never dealt with a program so big. Thank you in advance for your ideas!
Re: Ideas for a Class Project
Posted: Tue Nov 06, 2012 6:18 am
by kozikowski
Our favorite data structure is the Audacity Project. Audacity saves shows as Projects and does not save sound files. If you need a stand-alone sound file, you have to Export one from your timeline.
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/au ... jects.html
"My computer crashed while I was saving the project and now my show won't open."
"I deleted my AUP Project Manager file by accident and now I have several hundred thousand AU files. Can you put them back together?"
Koz
Re: Ideas for a Class Project
Posted: Tue Nov 06, 2012 11:23 am
by steve
Re: Ideas for a Class Project
Posted: Tue Nov 06, 2012 12:56 pm
by waxcylinder
Ok here's a suggestion for you to try ...
As you will see, from the link that Koz posted anbove, the project structure uses lots of little snippets of audio stored in the .au files (and managed by the associated .aup file).
These .au files are usually buckets of 1 mb (or less) - this is done to speed processing performance when editing. So you could try tweaking the size of the .au files that Audacity creates and then measure the effect on processing speed with say one of the compute-intensive effects or analyzers. Plot the results - recommend a bucket-size.
How you do it I've no idea
(I'm a documenter and QA person not a coder) I've never even looked at the code ...
WC
Re: Ideas for a Class Project
Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2012 7:10 am
by Gale Andrews
waxcylinder wrote:Ok here's a suggestion for you to try ...
you could try tweaking the size of the .au files that Audacity creates and then measure the effect on processing speed with say one of the compute-intensive effects or analyzers. How you do it I've no idea
Launch Audacity with the "blocksize" argument, for example:
Code: Select all
"S:audacityaudacity-win-2.0.3-alphaaudacity.exe" -blocksize 531950
which has Audacity writing 0.5 MB blocks instead of 1 MB.
Gale