Lose Debate, Post Last Word, Lock Topic, Erase VOTE?

Gale,

Your Dictate that the ->ALWAYS Prompt to SAVE<- policy is FINAL and IRREVOCABLE seems more like the arbitrary and capricious fiat of an autocratic than a well reasoned design decision based on best practices, user feedback and an unbiased weighing of the facts.

Try a file open and an immediate close with VI, Photoshop, word or any other editor and notice that none of them needlessly hassles you to “SAVE_NOTHING”. Even ms paint and notepad are smart enough to get this one right.

What happened to “THE VOTE” and why is the final count not published now that the topic has been decided and closed? The LANDSLIDE of opinion was 99+% in favor of NO-PROMPT_IF_NO-USER-EDITS. Was there one vote which overruled everybody else? Was the final rationale for this ruling “BECAUSE I SAID SO!”?

Let’s do a fact/sanity check:
#1 LISTED rated vote getter on FEATURE_REQUESTS page: google(audacity “effect preview”) → “About 3,500 results”
Save prompt (VOTE MISSING on FEATURE_REQUESTS page): google(audacity save prompt) → “About 280,000 results”

The vote you were so scrupulously metering seems to have disappeared from the http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Feature_Requests page without a trace. Have you lost the vote? [ <-= Rhetorical question, no actual response is expected <:-o) ]

Asking for ideas, donations and sponsors and then posting the LAST_WORD, immediately locking the topic, discarding all user feedback and erasing evidence from the “Feature Requests” page is hardly conducive to fostering a positive feedback loop, user involvement and financial support.

When a dictator is losing an election, they often shut down voting when defeat is imminent. How is this different that the closing, locking and erasure that just happened here? It looks like The Ayatollah finally put her foot down! :wink:

What this ORG needs is a Belligerent Balrog to keep the Trolls in line!

Warmest Regards,

BrianP007

If I had to guess at it, I’d say we brought out a new version of Audacity and the complaint system was reset. Does that sound more likely? Koz

Trolling in an aggressive manner was the reason your previous post was locked.

Your vote and that of others has not been “erased”. See http://wiki.audacityteam.org/w/index.php?title=Feature_Requests&action=history.

FWIW there are about a dozen votes for "trust the user and don’t show “Save Changes?” (or make it a preference). Just trusting the user is as we have said very unlikely to happen. Users frequently delete their imported files, thinking that “opening” them in Audacity has “saved” them, or think that closing the Audacity window will “save” their data.

The votes will appear on http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Feature_Requests when I or someone else tracking them gets the time to do so amongst all the other voluntary duties like answering users who want help and documenting and testing the software. It is not a priority to count votes for a feature that the developers are unlikely to implement, but there is every intention to count the votes.

As has been explained to you, Audacity does not open files, and Audacity is not a player. It is an editor that copies in data from files into projects that are then “dirty” because they are no longer empty.

FWIW, there are also votes for a system where the last audio that was present in Audacity (even if not an Audacity project) is reloaded when you restart Audacity (which obviates the need for “Save Changes?”). There are also votes for a way of not showing the “Save Changes” dialogue if all the audio has been exported. This is probably the most likely “solution” to happen. Personally I am not opposed to either of those solutions.

If this is important to you - then please code it yourself or ask if someone else here that can program will do it it for you. That’s why Audacity is open source. That will be a far quicker solution for you.

And finally, I am not female.


Gale

Nothing was reset. And we closed the Wiki to the public because of spammers and the work cleaning up well-intentioned but misguided/misleading edits.


Gale

Koz,

A) the close and lock was done yesterday. Today there is no trace of “THE VOTE”. Votes do NOT disappear between sw revs. Who is in charge of quality around here? A much more credible explanation is that it was NEVER ENTERED into the running because somebody with the keys to the ballot box was sure “it will probably never happen” and in a position to make it so.

You could be right (And Jimmy Hoffa could still be vacationing in the Poconos). Perhaps you could scan a recent vote backup and let us know. I want to see the score. My rough google search found 80 times more hits for the save prompt than for the #1 rated, listed feature. Do you smell a book cooking?? Please adjust temperature to 451! :wink:

And, while you are at it, please track down this misinformed muggle and explain the difference between twiddling with floating bits in memory and overwriting a file on the hard drive: “MP3 files have to be transcoded into Audacity 32-floating internal format, so yes, you have changed the MP3 by importing it.”. This myopic view from inside the program is not how users of any other editor on this planet see it. If We didn’t change it, it AIN’T CHANGED. A Program performing self-flagellation in memory does not count as a change to The Master!

My inner troll tells me that someone may have once accidentally nuked a file and took a stand for “QUALITY & SAFETY” to make sure this dreadful fate never befell anybody ever again. Good intention. When the tide of user feedback and pure, Vulcan logic dictated that NO-USER-CHANGE demanded NO-EXIT-INTERROGATION, this person probably dug their heels in to not appear to be a wishy-washy flip-flopper. How could one compromise on “QUALITY & SAFETY”? Then it became a battle of wills.

But, when the True Meaning of Christmas came through, The Grinch found the strength of 10 Grinches plus 2!

As a good scientist, as soon as a new theory is devised which explains 51% of The Phenomenon vs the paltry 49% explanation provided by your harebrained hypothesis, you now have a new favorite theory. Period.

When I see turf, I get an overpowering urge to pull the rug out from whomever is standing on it! Perhaps there is a med for this?!

Keep up the good work,

BrianP

If you read what I wrote, you will see there is no trace of the votes because indeed they have not yet been added. These are not simple issues if we care about our user’s data. The user who turns on the preference you want will be the first to complain when they turn the preference on by accident then lose their data.

As I wrote, there are a number of competing suggestions as to what we “could” implement and these all have to be summarised and written down when we have time.

We have added a few votes for numerous features which we are even less likely to implement.
Your suggestion that the votes are being hidden is an insult.

Developers typically neither read the Forum or Feature Requests. If you want to attract the developers’ attention, you can post on audacity-devel ( https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/audacity-devel ). If you troll, you will soon be banned from posting there.

As I said if you ask nicely here for someone to program this for you, they may even do it for you.

If you just want to play the song and look at the waves as well, there are some non-project based audio editors you can use for that purpose, such as Wavosaur.


Gale

Regarding the question about Audacity:

Audacity works with “projects”. An “Audacity Project” is a format specific to Audacity that allows Audacity to perform simple or complex audio editing and processing on one or more audio tracks. Audio may be “recorded” into an Audacity project or may be “imported” into an Audacity project. Please note that an Audacity project is not an audio file. To create a normal audio file from an Audacity Project you must “export” the audio. For more information about this, please see here in the manual: Audacity Manual

Returning to the original question from: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/prevent-prompt-save-changes-before-closing/29939/1

The misconception here is that “Audacity has opened the MP3 file”, but that is not what has happened. There are two actions that have occurred:

  1. A new (empty) Audacity Project has been opened.
  2. An MP3 file has been imported (copied) into the Audacity project.

Note that the Audacity Project is no longer a new empty project as it now contains imported audio data from the MP3 file.
On closing, Audacity (rightly in my opinion) asks the user whether they want to save the changes.

This behaviour is entirely in keeping with how the vast majority of other computer programs behave after importing data.
As an example:

  1. Open Libre Office Writer (or Open Office Writer) [free open source word processors].
  2. Drag a text file into the open document. The text file is imported into the document.
  3. Close Libre Office. You are asked if you want to save the changes.


    Regarding feature votes:
    Please note that Audacity is a free open source program and is primarily created, maintained and supported by unpaid volunteers in their “spare time”. Developing new features can be a difficult and time consuming task, so not surprisingly the reality of the situation is that developers will generally prefer to spend their time working on things that they are interested in. Nevertheless, we feel that it is worthwhile to keep a record of feature requests from users as it serves to provide insight and overview of those things that users are interested in.

As an example, it was previously thought to be near impossible to implement any form of “real time processing” in Audacity due to the fundamental architecture of the program. However, we continued to keep a record of “votes” for this feature, which proved to be the most popular requested feature of all (by a large margin). In Audacity 2.1.0 we are very pleased to announce the first ever implementation of “real time preview”. Currently this feature is limited to VST and LADSPA effects only, but future versions of Audacity should see it refined and gradually rolled out to other types of effect.

In short, “voting” for a feature does not mean that the feature will be implemented any time soon. For a feature to be implemented it needs to be technically feasible, it may need consideration regarding conflicts with other features, and very importantly it requires someone with the necessary technical skills to have the time and interest to implement it.

As an open source program we welcome contributions from new developers.


Regarding belligerent ranting:
The final two posts from Brian P Barnes have been disapproved. Please note that referring to the forum staff as terrorists with personal vendettas does not strengthen your point, it only wastes our time which would otherwise be better spent helping other Audacity users.